


The Tower

by NoisyGhost



Category: The Evil Within (Video Game)
Genre: AU bullshit, Blood and Gore, Experimental Style, Gen, Mystery, i dont know what to tag this as it's all bullshit, lots of inner monologue
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-28
Updated: 2015-08-28
Packaged: 2018-04-17 14:23:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 11
Words: 25,668
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4669928
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NoisyGhost/pseuds/NoisyGhost
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the nightmare inside STEM is dealt with, Sebastian finds himself on the path to getting his life back together. Only problem is, the detectives frequent lapses in memory make it difficult to tell just how he came to waking up in that hospital. And with only the images of his partner slowly losing his mind and the junior detective hiding secrets, Sebastian isn’t even sure he wants to know what ghost is haunting him. (An AU Trip through STEM. Read notes for a better explanation!)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. 10. Exit wound

**Author's Note:**

> SHORT SUMMARY: This is an AU trip through STEM. Some of the chapters follow canon, some do not. It’s meant to be a mystery: you are not supposed to know exactly what is going on until the end when everything is pieced together.
> 
> IMPORTANT!: This fic is not meant to be read in chronological order! This is why the chapters are not posted in chronological order!
> 
> There are 10 chapters and an epilogue. Instead of being read like this: 1 > 2 > 3 > 4 > 5 … > 10, it is meant to be read in this order: 10 > 1 > 9 > 2 > 8 > 3 > 7 > 4 > 6 > 5\. IT IS MEANT TO SIMULATE THE FEELING OF AMNESIA (if you’ve ever seen the movie Memento, it’s the same thing). 
> 
> Chronologically, part 10 is the LAST PART in the story, yet it is the FIRST PART you will read. Then you will read part 1, which, chronologically, takes place FIRST. So the last part you will read is part 5, which, chronologically, takes place in the MIDDLE of the story.
> 
> THIS IS VERY OBVIOUSLY AN AU FIC. It is also highly experimental and you will not have a good idea what is happening until it’s over (even then it might not make sense lmao). After you’ve read it in the correct order first, I recommend reading through again in chronological order to see all the things you missed.
> 
> AGAIN: READ IT IN THE RIGHT ORDER FIRST. I worked my ASS off setting it up this way and I would appreciate it being read in it’s intended manner.
> 
> I really appreciate anyone who gives this a read! I tried soooo fucking hard on this and I’d really love some feedback!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sebastian wakes up in the hospital.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Our story here begins at the end! (Ignore the first chapter number (the 1): this chapter takes place TENTH chronologically!)

Softly, Sebastian blinks. Only once at first, eyes closing to let the sound slowly filter in before he blinks again.

Then a third time. Blurred vision makes the sterility of the white light drenching the room palatable; it makes the edges less harsh and the sheets that wrap around him feel warm and plush. He’s comfortable, though heavy with a dull and distant ache.

But at least he feels something. It’s as if he’s unhurriedly waking from a very vivid dream, one that’s wrought him with pain and misery only to leave him completely numb to all stimulation. But here, now, wherever he is, he feels at peace.

The bags under his eyes aren’t as sharp as they’d been before, though they still weigh heavily. They go unnoticed for now, deep sighs passing between his chapped lips as he casually begins to assess the situation.

He’s encased in a downy light that he knows should ease his stress, but still he remains unnerved; still he feels as if something is wrong…

“It’s good to see you’re finally awake.”

Sebastian doesn’t immediately respond to the words spoken in his direction; they feel far off and muffled, but slowly become clearer as he focuses on the reverb of each breath.

“Where am I?”

There’s a pause, the faint echo of a fan twirling off somewhere while some machine hums carefully to itself.

“In the hospital, Sebastian.”

In the hospital. The detective swallows, attention clearing itself, eyes narrowing on the individual panes of the ceiling. The last thing he remembers is falling unconscious in that hell-hole and then? Well, then he must’ve wound up here.

“Ruvik escaped,” is all he musters, little concern for his own well being.

“There’s nothing we could have done about that, Sebastian. You did everything you could. Hell, I wouldn’t even be alive if not for you.”

Another pause, this one almost more painful than the last. Sebastian tilts his head to the side, pillow displacing itself softly underneath him as he adjusts his weight. He finds himself making direct eye contact with his partner.

“He still escaped. He still escaped, and I’m stuck in here.”

Joseph cocks his head to the side, obviously thinking over what to say next. But it’s hard. It’s hard because he probably has no idea what Sebastian wants to hear. He has one leg crossed over the other, elbow propped up on an arm-rest in the chair beside the bed. A gloved finger taps at his lower lip, brow furrowing just barely behind dark frames. “Everything will feel like normal again soon. Can you trust me on that? We can worry about Ruvik later. What’s important is that you’re OK.”

“We are,” Sebastian sighs, attention returning to the ceiling. This place feels… safe, but also confining. There’s comfort in it, but he still feels the horror of something lingering just off in the distance. And Joseph’s calm demeanor doesn’t help; the horrors of STEM will never truly leave him.

“Look, you just need to work on getting some rest. Give the job a break for once. We can talk strategy after you’ve put yourself back together again.”

Sebastian’s response is a frown. A deep frown that draws out the creases on either side of his lips. He doesn’t think Joseph is eager to shove this all under the covers, but there’s a distinct pressure for Sebastian to just forget. Forget what he’s been through and simply try and put together his life again.

But that isn’t possible anymore. Not after everything he’s seen and --

“Jone called earlier. She’ll be here as soon as she gets off work. Haven’t heard from your other sisters, but I’m sure they’ll do everything they can to get here.”

Sebastian holds his breath for a second. There’s relief in the statement but also anxiety. Since the accident, Sebastian hasn’t exactly been the greatest sibling. Phone calls had gone unanswered, late night arguments had drawn into the mornings, dinners were missed, and much more than that. Sebastian knows that only another accident will ever bring them back together, but the idea that they’ll somehow rebuild? Sebastian figures it’s impossible, figures he’s already dug his grave too deep.

“Don’t you just get a sick feeling from all this?” Sebastian is still frustrated, but it’s mild. Watered down. He can’t even place his own anxiety.

“Sebastian, you survived an incredibly traumatic event. You aren’t going to feel right for a long time.”

“But it’s more than that. I feel… I feel like I’m missing something. Like I’m missing a part of myself. Do you have any idea what I’m trying to say? Are you even listening to me?”

“Of course I’m listening, Sebastian. I think you’re just… I think you’re thinking too hard about all this. You’re getting yourself worked up for nothing.”

To that, Sebastian doesn’t respond. Joseph’s tone… wavers when he speaks. He’s nervous. Or is that something else? Sebastian can’t tell. Either way, it doesn’t feel right. And it wouldn’t. No amount of warm blankets and calm-tempered assurances ever would.

“Sebastian, I just don’t want to see you get swallowed up by this again. Is that too much? That someone actually worries about you?” Joseph’s posture adjusts; he leans forward and presses his palms against his knees, shaking vaguely. “You came back from it all. And now you can do whatever you want. You can go anywhere you want. I just don’t want you to waste this opportunity getting wrapped up in the same nightmare again.”

Joseph’s words feel sincere, but Sebastian still holds them with a grain of salt. Because he doesn’t feel free at all. Hell, he feels more trapped than he’s ever been. Trapped in himself, trapped in his old delusions. He almost wants to cry. But he knows he can’t.

“I just don’t feel like myself. I feel like I left something behind, like a piece of me is missing.”

Joseph looks down at the floor, expression unchanging. What sort of answer did Sebastian expect, honestly? None of them would fill the void.

“Look I… I know what you’re trying to say. Really. But Ruvik is gone. We don’t have to look over our shoulders any more, don’t have to worry that some hellish abomination is going to spring up out of the dark and attack at any given moment. It’s over. Can’t we have some kind of satisfaction in that?”

Joseph looks genuinely worried now. But it’s… a strange kind of worry. Not worried for Sebastian’s well-being, but worried for his own, almost. He still looks antsy, tense, as if he actually is waiting for something to spring up out of the dark and attack at any given moment.

“...Right.” Sebastian lets it go. Because, for whatever reason, he knows Joseph won’t let up and he knows his partner will keep using the same excuse over and over again. Joseph doesn’t want to acknowledge that Sebastian feels a serious disconnect from what he’s currently experiencing, and so he continues to push it under the rug while assuring the older man that everything will be ok.

“...I just… don’t actually remember much of what happened in STEM…” Sebastian continues after a break. “I almost feel like I got time completely wrong; like my body was just moved from place to place and there are spaces in between that my head completely skipped over. I know none of it was real but...that shit’s going to haunt me.”

“...What do you remember?”

“I mean, I remember a lot of it before it gets blurry. I remember the call to Beacon, and I remember that fucking sound…”

“What else?”

“Well… I remember everything clearly until we got to the church…”


	2. 1. Saint joseph

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sebastian remembers what happened in the church.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I feel like this chapter jump is easy to follow but if not: this chapter is the scene right after the dog fight in the church! (ignore the first chapter number (the 2): this takes place FIRST chronologically!)

A moment ago, Sebastian Castellanos had had the greatest urge to punch his partner in the face. It’s not the first time such a thought has popped into his mind, and it definitely won’t be the last. But the instance is just so perfectly setup and timed that it borders on comedic -- a giant, hellish, nightmare hound had knocked his partner free of his glasses in an encephalon rendered churchyard. And the nearly picturesque sunset almost made the insinuated request to fetch said glasses more palatable, but that didn’t water down his desire to plant his knuckles square against Joseph’s pouty baby face any less.

“... It’s not just about being unable to see, It’s about feeling normal,” is his partners response upon the return of his cherished glasses. Sebastian simply stares, eyes half open and face devoid of any expression other than one that seemed to mutter _‘I can’t believe what I just did for you.’_

“It’s alright. Let’s just focus on finding Kidman.” Yes, that’s essentially what he’s thinking, just add a few choice words he knows his partner would disapprove of.

But, truth be told, Sebastian absolutely can believe what he just did for his younger companion. They’re in hell, but they’re in hell together, and they’ve banded together like brothers as they’ve always had. If having his glasses back somehow stops the corruption that riddles his bones, it isn’t Sebastian’s choice to deny him that. He has very little in this world to prove except that he’s still worthy of his partner’s admiration. Part of him believes that Joseph has the same notion.

Still, under his breath, he has to keep his trademark stoicism and cold wit about him and mutters something along the lines of _‘Jeez, Joseph, all that for a pair of glasses.’_

There is no time to mutter about what could and couldn’t have been done. There is even less time to stand out in the open and complain about each other’s company when they are trapped in Ruvik’s nightmare with only each other to lean on for escape.

But they don’t solely have to lean on each other -- he knows that. In the distance they spot their Junior Detective fleeing into the church that they now stood twenty feet away from. With any luck, they’ll regroup inside.

Sebastian does not assume they’ll have such luck.

He collects his partner nonetheless and they make their way towards their only hope, one that keeps slowly pushing itself just out of reach. Insistently, his partner waves Sebastian away, no less than adamant to prove the worth of his own two legs. Consistently pathetic attempts at standing his own ground obviously weigh down on Joseph; to feel like a burden is something the elder detective recognizes and abhors when it relates to himself. At some point you realize people are better off without you, that your very breath steals air from another, and it hurts.

Twice Sebastian blinks, clearing the dust from his eyes as a hand falls to his side. Joseph's brow furrows in determination as he dismisses another helpful gesture. He will not allow himself to lean on Sebastian for guidance, despite his persistent stumbling across the tattered remains of stone steps.

Part of him is pissed Joe can be so stubborn, part of him is offended that Joe doesn’t want to lean on him, and part of him accepts it because Sebastian Castellanos would be just as fucking dense.

Movements languid, tired fingers trace the warm metal of the church door carved out of the pseudo front-facing wall. Walls crumble just around the corner, and Sebastian wonders if Ruvik’s distaste did that or if he’d really created this from memory. Then he remembers that he doesn’t care.

The air inside is simulated, but it’s cooler than the humid mask outside that’d pressed consistent moisture to his brow. And despite the stained glass that echoed a sense of forgiveness and shelter, the light filtering down below onto the slowly caving floor was more than vaguely foreboding; he takes each step into the nave with ample trepidation and his eyes are wary of oncoming danger for his partner’s sake as well. Occasionally, his attention shoots up to the clerestory in fear that each panel of glass will simply explode when the room verges in on itself.

This fear is not just his paranoia, not anymore, and no one would argue it was. He takes only meager consolation in knowing the fact that he isn’t the crazy, over-zealous one any more. But it’s something, at least.

While his eyes wander and Joseph somehow manages to walk down the aisle, Sebastian eventually settles into a sense of muted discomfort. Which is admittedly better than hard-boiled paranoia, though still not exactly desirable. He sees the altar just up ahead, but it seems a hundred miles away. Every step feels like it takes him nowhere and yet he keeps walking.

He keeps walking until the echo of a mortified scream ricochetes out of a hole in the floor and the elder detective immediately charges into action. He won’t admit it, but he thrives under chaos and, though he doesn’t appreciate it, he fears what would happen to his reputation if he isn’t ever placed in a dangerous situation ever again. Danger, the job, fighting tooth and nail -- it’s all that keeps him from sinking right back into the bottle and corking up the top for good. He needs to feel capable or he’ll surely lose his wit for good.

The altar is mangled, either by age or Ruvik taking his revenge, but the tunnel that filtered the child-like scream is barred by steel rods and half covered by a statue. Still, it is indistinguishably Leslie down there --

_“You have to stay with me now, there’s no other way -- “_

Kidman. She’s with Leslie. That should be some consolation, but Sebastian can’t tell what he makes of it. Kidman is his responsibility and he trusts her more than he should. She’s young, inexperienced, aloof and --

\-- a lot like him. Joseph always said his guilt and regret made him too quick to accept her into their ranks, but it was more than that, more than Sebastian could ever explain to his partner, even though Joseph was well aware of what Sebastian was and where he came from. It wasn’t something that could even be explained. It just was.

So he holds onto the hope that Kidman has a capable handle on the situation, that somewhere in his drunken stupor he’d been sober enough to teach her something about the job. Part of him wants to prove Joseph wrong. The other part just doesn’t want to be wrong himself.

The voices dim slowly until Sebastian is certain he’d heard the last of their conversation. Quickly he returns to Joseph to relay the information; his partner is doing about as well as you can imagine. He’s slumped over into the pew, entire body forced downwards by what must’ve felt like gravity suddenly exerting double on his skeleton.

Joseph is lithe, athletic and lean, but not built in any sense of the word. He carries a narrow frame, but he’d never exactly looked fragile either. Right now, though, he looks like he’ll slowly cave in on himself. No, not slowly, quite rapidly, actually. And repeatedly. Like someone had chucked a grenade down his throat and, after it’d exploded, they figured they’d just keep throwing more in until his innards had all but evaporated and his skin shell is the only thing holding him up. Not even that is good enough.

“Hey, Joseph -- you still with me?” Sebastian finally prompts, significantly more nonchalant than a person in his situation should be, yet still noticeably firm. He stands idle in front of Joseph, just waiting for an answer, anything to confirm that his partner is still a real human being. And, for a moment, he holds his breath.

“Sebastian -- “ Joseph begins to respond, but halfway through his coughing fit, the elder detective already has his hands clamped on his partners shoulders. The fact that Joseph is having such a difficult time speaking, that he needs Sebastian to hold him upright, doesn’t bode well for either of them.

“ -- you ever have the urge to just jump?”

There’s a pause. Awkward isn’t the word that he would use to describe it, because that would denote a slightly friendlier environment. No, the beginning of Joseph's sentence isn’t awkward, it’s _unnerving_.

“When you’re on a high place,” he continues, disrupted by a cough. “or the subway rolls by… imagine if you had that urge for a minute straight. Then two minutes.”

“You fought it off three times now, Joseph. You’re learning to stop it,” Sebastian instinctively replies, offering what encouragement he can. Because Sebastian Castellanos has never known what it meant to give up; not like this. You could let the little things go, but not shit like this, not your life.

“You’re not listening!” Joseph musters more zeal than he’s had in hours, pushing Sebastian back with a one-armed shove. To be fair, it isn’t all that powerful of a push, Sebastian just goes with it because he’s half terrified Joseph will break if he holds too much pressure on his shoulders. “I’m not worried about stopping it, Seb… _I’m worried about not wanting to stop it._ ”

Every pause between them makes the conversation more unnerving. Sebastian can feel the muscles in his stomach tighten and suffocate the organs inside, choking him out one breath at a time. But aside from a stiff glare, he shows none of it on the outside.

“Some part of me wants to turn… I don’t know why, and I can’t reason it away. It’s… deeper than that. It’s like instinct. And it’s getting stronger.”

What’s Sebastian supposed to say? Is he supposed to have some kind of speech prepared, some kind of rousing monologue that’d convince his friend that everything is ok? Because everything isn’t ok. And Sebastian knows if he opens his mouth he’ll only make things worse. That’s kind of all he’s good at anymore.

He leans forward, wanting nothing more than to say something that’ll fix everything, yet nothing comes out but air. Air, and the sudden, ear drum shattering ring that jolts through it.

There’s barely been a breath’s pause between when Sebastian had parted his lips to speak and the violent sound that suddenly pervades all their senses. It sends a migraine raking the sides of his skull, like barbed wire being pushed in one ear and pulled out the other. But as he clutches his temple and forces himself to stand upright, it’s apparent that this sound, no matter how vicious, is still hurting his partner more than it could ever hurt him.

Joseph’s fingers clutch at his head furiously, gasps of pain muddling in the back of his throat, words unable to escape as anything more than squandered breaths. He wants to cry out, Sebastian can hear that, but there’s nothing there. Just the gasping.

And yet, still now, Sebastian insists that there’s something that he can do. He refuses to be helpless, refuses to be a simple onlooker, giving up his body to some monster that would stand idly by and let his friend suffer. Even if it seems absolutely hopeless, Sebastian will not give up like Joseph has.

“Hold on--” He doesn’t know if Joseph can hear him or if he’s even cognitive enough to care, but Sebastian’s brandishing a syringe before his partner’s even so much as looked up at him. These things…. he couldn’t trust them. They were of Ruvik’s creation, though whether it was a choice of his or not he doesn’t know. Either way, here, in this reality, these things had saved his life more than once. It’s at the point where he doesn’t care if they’re secretly poison.

“This might…” He doesn’t actually know what it might do. But it’s in Joseph’s neck before he’s finished the sentence. Maybe it’ll help him stave Ruvik off? Or maybe this was a trap the whole time. Sebastian doesn’t know! He’s sick and tired of not knowing things, but you kind of just have to roll with the punches when the chips are on the table like this.

Sebastian used to be pretty good at poker.

But the gasps and the pained moans don’t stop. Not from either of them. Joseph has basically collapsed onto the floor and if Sebastian didn’t feel as if his feet were rooted to the concrete, he would probably cave in too. Yet he still stands, partner’s movements slowly ceasing at his feet while he holds the side of his head, eventually mustering the gall to tilt his head upwards and find the source of that fucking sound.

Why had he expected or hoped to see anyone other than that bastard, that psychotic, ghost of a man? Ruvik is perched high on the chandelier with zero concern for falling and an almost bored expression plastered across his face. Bored! He probably is at this point; are Sebastian and Joseph’s struggles so uninteresting that he has to come along and pose the dolls himself?

With a wave of the hand, Sebastian is no longer firmly rooted to the concrete. But he goes in the opposite direction he’d thought; instead of falling over, Ruvik picks the man up off the ground and dangles him there like a mouse before it’s fed to a snake.

( Is Ruvik the metaphorical snake or does he actually have a giant pet snake that Sebastian will have to fight? )

The church begins to break, pews disassembling themselves, alter finally cracking under all this psychological strain. Ruvik is tearing the place apart, but aside from the vague ringing, there’s silence. Joseph ceased to move, laying on the floor, seemingly unaffected by Ruvik’s telekinesis, while Sebastian floats some twenty feet away from the false safety of the ground.

And, once again, Sebastian finds himself not exactly knowing what he should have expected. What goes up, must come down.

Ruvik drops him through the fucking floor.


	3. 9. Tephrosis

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sebastian faces off against Ruvik.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter jump is a little... less coherent haha. This scene is the end boss fight and is canon divergent so it'll read differently! (Ignore the first chapter number (the 3): this takes place NINTH chronologically!)

Something surges out of him that he can’t explain, like a hundred ashen hands suddenly ripping out from the back of his throat, tearing him apart from the inside until he sees nothing but darkness, feels nothing but darkness.

That couldn’t have killed him.

Consciousness lost in a moment, it rebuilds itself in the next, the ringing of a bullet still echoing distantly in the back of his mind.

He’d been shot. That was obvious. But when he looks down, there’s no bullet hole or blood. Only dirt and ash. How had getting shot (but not actually) cause him to recoil so violently that he finds himself in a completely different location than he was before?

He blinks, still not sure how he’s supposed to feel right now.

That gunshot shouldn’t have been able to hit him… yet it did.

 _Ok, let’s take a step back_. Absolutely and without a doubt, Sebastian is alone, definitely not by choice. Joseph had all but disappeared since their last encounter and Kidman had made it quite clear she couldn’t trust him to stay out of her way….

But she hadn’t shot to kill. Whatever she’d done back there, she knew damn well it wouldn’t kill him. She just wanted to scare him off, wanted to buy herself some time to escape while he was flung far away from wherever they’d just run into each other. She’d trusted him enough to let him live.

Well, that sentiment was short lived. It’s not like a single shot to the chest could kill him anyway, especially one that left no mark at all. Sebastian lets his hand hover over his ribcage; was it luck? Or did she really know exactly where to hit him?

He shakes his head. None of that matters now. Kidman and he shared a goal: get to Leslie before Ruvik. Kidman hadn’t trusted him to hold onto his body long enough to help her, and that’s why she went solo.

But that doesn’t stop Sebastian from continuing on his own anyway. It was only by luck that he’d been brought here, into the lobby of Beacon Mental Hospital, after she’d sent him away. Or was it something else? Why can’t he remember how he got here? Was it really just by chance that Kidman’s bullet brought him to this place? Or did some other force drop him here?

_“You cannot keep me here.”_

And there’s that voice again, stinging the back of his brain, tugging at his strings. Right. Now he remembered exactly how he got teleported here. That asshole was in his brain, trying to coerce him into doing things he knows he’ll regret. Sebastian wants to be able to live with himself when this ordeal is over--he couldn’t give in to that voice.  

_“You cannot keep the boy from me.”_

“Shut the fuck up already…” Sebastian mutters to himself, finally moving his feet forward towards the elevator.

This is it, after all. The apex, the climax, the big dramatic conclusion to this fucked up story. It all came down to who got to Leslie first; who escaped STEM in what body. To think it all rests on the shoulders of a boy this innocent, it’s the strangest thing about this place.

But Sebastian--despite that voice echoing in his head, the voice he swore he’d gotten rid of for good--couldn’t let Leslie be used for something so vile. Not without at least trying to stop it. That’s why he gets on that elevator with little reservation, that’s why he stands so still with his fingers clenched into fists at his sides. That’s why he hasn’t caved yet.

Leslie had been in the courtyard. At least he thinks that was Leslie. And Sebastian doesn’t entirely recall ever actually being in the courtyard himself, but the vague, persistent memory of rain exists and he opts to believe that, at some point, he’d consciously moved his body here.

Or not. Memory is… relative. Fickle. It changes, can be manipulated, filtered through different lenses. For all Sebastian knows he’d been a pawn this whole time. Maybe he hadn’t actually just teleported here; maybe he’d been possessed and walked here of his own volition?

His fingers are clenched into fists at his sides. That was an awful thought.

He’s still stuck on that thought when his legs start moving again; the giant terminal almost doesn’t seem out of place anymore, he doesn’t feel the need to tread carefully over the glass floor beneath him. It was all a giant machine after all, and with no discernible protrusions or spikes or explosives, Sebastian feels no inclination to worry. Hell, he probably wouldn’t be concerned even if those things were visible.

But they’re not. It’s just a giant, brain stem looking abomination burrowing into the floor. A completely average sight.

To be fair, he’s seen weirder today. Much weirder.

Eventually he diverts his attention through the glass, something he probably should have done the second he’d stepped into this room. Arranged rather meticulously around the central column of the room are tubs filled with what he’s guessing is a salt solution (this is all hypothetical, he reminds himself, because none of this is fucking real).

But more importantly than whatever suspicious liquid the tubs are filled with, is what’s in the liquid. Not something dumped into them, something dark and distinct floating above the water in each and every vessel.

Bodies. There’s one in every single tub.

But that isn’t even the worst part of the situation. No, the worst is probably the part where he recognizes them.

“It can’t be…” Yet it is. Why he felt the need to voice his concerns to himself is beyond the point. You think he’d have had enough out of body experiences today to not find staring at his own unconscious body all that weird. And yet here he is.

His eyes narrow on the body as his limbs urge him to back away. His head is resting off to the side, mouth only slightly ajar, and the whole mortality of the view makes his entire body stiff. He blinks a few times, not able to look away. That body… his body… it just looks so out of place. And why is he lying like that? His position doesn’t look comfortable, the way his neck is turned and his head--

“Help, help!”

A shrill cry draws Sebastian away from himself (literally?), and forces his attention elsewhere. But he recognizes that voice before it’d even emerged from the hallway.

“Sebastian, _get away from him._ ”

Leslie doesn’t run out of those doors alone, of course. No, right behind him is the junior detective he’d seen what felt like barely moments ago. But then again, it could have been hours.

A huff escapes the detective as Leslie flees to his side. It’s as if the boy is more scared of what Kidman could do to him than what Sebastian is capable of. It’s almost like… Leslie cared more about how Sebastian had helped him before than what is happening now. Leslie is probably the only person who still trusts Sebastian.

“Sebastian, listen to me,” Kidman insists, arms held stiffly at her sides. “Stop. I know what you’re thinking and you’re _wrong_.”

“I get it,” he retorts with little space for breath in between. “You’re not just some rookie detective and this kid is really fucking important--”

“You can’t go back on what you said back there, Sebastian!”

“I’m not, Kidman! Why are you assuming I am?”

Kidman draws back and stares for a long time. She remembers, quite clearly, shooting him. “You’re a good man, Sebastian. That’s why I… it doesn’t matter anymore. You know who this kid is. You know why he can’t be allowed to live. At least I thought you knew.”

Sebastian hesitates. She was right--he does know the potential consequences of his actions. But he still can’t let her kill this kid. Especially if what she said about him is true…

“... It’s Ruvik. He’s the one we need to worry about--”

But you speak of the devil and the devil shall appear. Sebastian’s barely begun defending his case when that ringing sound is heard, shattering the eardrums of anyone still under the mad man’s thumb.

The detective blinks once and he sees his surroundings begin to collapse. He blinks again and everything turns a disgusting shade of yellow. Another blink and the column in the center of the room has literally turned into a giant brain.

Why does none of this surprise him any more?

But his lack of shock is made up for in anger; how can Ruvik so easily twist the expression of this world? Why only him? Sebastian knows why, but it still pisses him off--aren’t they supposed to have some kind of conscious influence here? Shouldn’t Sebastian be able to… to make this all stop?

No, he’s just left staring helplessly around him as Leslie is suddenly missing from his side. But he hasn’t disappeared.

“Leslie--!” Sebastian doesn’t think anyone heard him shout. Nor would it have made a difference if they had; his attention instinctively whips around to the center of the room where the boy has moved to, small fingers clutched around each other, frame shaking softly.

Sebastian is, maybe, under the assumption that shouting the boy’s name will somehow magically stop the scene from unfolding before him. Like hitting the pause button, like there just had to be something in his power that he can possibly do to save this kid.

But the words end up gingerly brushing against the sides of his throat as Ruvik commits his crime anyway.

In his palms, Leslie melts. Literally. There’s no way to romanticize what unfolds, no flowery words to make it any more dignified. He’s simply there in one instant and turning to liquid in another.

Again, Sebastian wishes he could feel shocked. But he can’t. There’s no distinct feeling of fear or terror, only anger. Ruvik has crossed a line. That’s not to say he hadn’t crossed the line several fucking hours ago, but this is the _coup de gras_ of line-crossings.

“You bastard!” Sebastian is the only one speaking anymore; Ruvik simply stares on in his own disgusting sense of self-righteousness. Because Ruvik got what he wanted, Ruvik got Leslie. And not a damn thing Kidman or Sebastian or Joseph had done made a damn bit of difference. “What right did you have?”

The scenery around them begins to collapse as a low rumble emanates from underneath the both of them. Sebastian seems too pissed to care. But when he turns his attention to Kidman, she’s no longer there. It’s almost like she’d never been.  

"I figured you out," Ruvik almost laughs. At least that's what it looks like to Sebastian; burnt lips curled into a smirk though no sound but words escapes. There is no immediate response. “I figured out how you’ve been so resilient. How you’ve stayed alive. But also why you still fear death.”

Sebastian feels a tugging at the base of his spine, like his metaphorical stomach is pushing his organs back while his abdomen catches on fire. The detective wants to spit something clever back in response, but there’s nothing that’ll wipe that dirty fucking grin off Ruvik’s face.

“You won’t get away with this,” he eventually barks out, watching helplessly as the world beneath his feet begins to disintegrate, liquid pouring through the glass, metal twisting and contorting until it’s soft and fleshy.

“I can’t lie and say you haven’t been a thorn in my side,” Ruvik’s voice persists, but his body is not quite his own anymore. There’s a vague blurring of limbs, a slow disappearance into the air as he seemingly merges with the environment. At this point, Sebastian is literally standing on a brain. Yet he still can’t take his eyes off Ruvik. “At first I thought it was a shame they dragged you into this. But now? I should have done this a long time ago.”

It’s true. What Ruvik says. About how resilient to death Sebastian had been. Even when he’d died he hadn’t actually died; that had to piss the mad scientist off. But he glances down at his chest and remembers he’s not actually immortal. He’s just got luck so bad that it’s turning in on itself; his luck is actually so bad that it’s _keeping him alive_.

Alive, of course, after everything he’d been through, is a relative term.

Sebastian watches as everything around him is torn to shreds. The tower itself is uprooted, glass exploding loudly, debris cracking and drifting into the air. A distant city scape crumbles in on itself, contorting and collapsing and culminating into massive bundles of exposed nerves and flesh. The sight is unreal; no part of this can be mistaken for anything resembling the Krimson City he’s known.

And then there’s Ruvik himself; once a man, now something entirely different. He’s started… piecing himself back together again. But all the pieces aren’t his own, they belonged to others. He’s a chimera, an amalgam, a mess of flesh and limbs sewn and meshed together into something that resembled a failed concrete sculpture more than something that was once human.

Had Ruvik ever been human? Maybe. A long time ago.

For a while, Sebastian had been under the impression that he couldn’t die. He’d tried to be modest but what was the point? He’d gotten way too good at surviving. But Ruvik knew. Ruvik knew that Sebastian could die. And Ruvik responded about as accordingly as Sebastian would have expected.

He straight up tries to murder Sebastian.

A hand comes down where Sebastian was a moment prior. A monstrous, alien palm slams into the ground, kicking up dust and viscera. But Sebastian was sharper here than he was before. Quicker, if he could even call it that. Ruvik was strong but Sebastian had learned his own tricks.

All he had to do was take down Ruvik without letting that asshole get inside his head first. Which he wishes wasn’t as difficult as it were. Because even after he’d been cut free of Ruvik’s influence, there’s still that voice in his head trying to tell him what to do. And right now, it was pissed.

Luckily! Sebastian is more pissed! And the fun thing about anger is that it can basically drive you to do some pretty incredible shit under pressure.

Another hand comes down; slow and without grace; Sebastian can basically see it coming before it’s even close; he can practically teleport out of the way if he wants, his body surprisingly in tune with the flowing motion he needed to make to get out of the way.

But Ruvik is nothing if not persistent and this fun game of hit and dodge can’t last forever. Sebastian knows he isn’t invulnerable but he still has to keep down a swelling sense of cockiness. Because that’s exactly what he wants: Sebastian to slip up and fall into that trap all over again.

No. This fight, this game, it has to _end_.

Except Sebastian’s poor excuse for a body isn’t really prepared to take down something like the monster Ruvik has become. His only hope is manipulating the environment. But Ruvik has turned it into such a clusterfuck, it is practically impossible to find anything substantial enough to fling at him.

And then Sebastian remembers something. Something important. The one thing that had engulfed the both of them; the thing that had warped Sebastian into what he is and drove Ruvik into this.

Because Sebastian wouldn’t say he’s good at many things. But he knows how to fix a gun jam, knows how to build a tourniquet if someone needed it, knows how to ration food, how to hotwire a car. He can translate spanish to english and back again, he can take out a guy twice his size with a few marked hits. He can start a fire.

_He can start a fire._

Sebastian passes through the rubble of a collapsed office building, going to a place Ruvik can’t follow without first tearing apart the entire structure. Ruvik has size and sheer brute strength on his side. But Sebastian has something better.

Sebastian has a massive fucking chip on his shoulder.

The bigger the target, the harder they fall, right? That logic applies here still, right? Physics have basically taken a shit and been tossed out the window but the metaphor is still intact at least. Well, he can hope.

His only shot is finding a way to burn Ruvik out. But a thing that size will take more than just a little spark, and Sebastian knows he doesn’t have the firepower to just set him ablaze like this. No, he has to actually use his brain for once in his life. You know. Like an actual detective.

When Ruvik crushes the wall that’d barred his sight from Sebastian, the detective is no longer there. He’d successfully tossed himself out the end of the hall into the foreseeable void of Ruvik’s hellscape. But his body had brought itself on top of a vehicle; one of the military gun trucks he’d seen in the city.

But Sebastian isn’t interest in the guns. There isn’t much he can do with them anyway. He is interested in the type of explosion only a movie could promise him. And, standing in the bed of a truck haphazardly floating above an incalculable drop into the fucking abyss (or whatever), Sebastian suddenly knows exactly what he needs to do.

And of course Ruvik can’t wait to take the bait.

His entire form has slunk past the overturned office building, wrapped itself up on one of the many brain-like structures situated beneath him. But beneath the car is exactly where Sebastian wants him to be.

A massive tentacle shoots into the air, coiling around the car with vice like assuredness; Ruvik sought to drag Sebastian to the pits of tartarus. But like a resilient child, all of Sebastian opposes violently.

And with the car tipping at an odd angle, Sebastian cuts the fuel line.

Gasoline drips almost casually as the car is dragged through the air, closer and closer to the maw of the monster. Sebastian swears he’d felt pieces of himself get dragged into that black hole of a mouth. Wait…

Now, the thing is, Sebastian doesn’t need to be here. He can jump at any given time. But he doesn’t. And the reason why he doesn’t is pretty obvious.

Because the thing is, Ruvik doesn’t stand a chance. He never had. And, yes, he’d won. Yes, he’d gotten to Leslie and Sebastian couldn’t stop it. But Ruvik can never hope to kill Sebastian. Not like this. Not when he’s literally taken away everything Sebastian ever cared about in life.

Ruvik should have known that Sebastian will always be there to haunt him.

Sebastian and the truck are less than a body’s length away from Ruvik and his monstrous form. And then a spark ignites.

The fun thing about fire and gasoline is that, when mixed, they cause explosions. And it’s about as satisfying as you could imagine.

 

 


	4. 2. Timebomb

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Being stuck in hell makes you reflect on some annoyingly deep shit.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a very introspective chapter. Kind of a look into Sebastian's thoughts. (Ignore the first chapter number (the 4): chronologically, this is the SECOND chapter!)

There’s a churning in his stomach that rivals an earthquake, a pain in his jaw that makes it apparent that his head bears weight and that it’s suddenly an effort to keep his neck from craning and slumping forward. A heavy exhale rides on the coat-tails of a sharp inhale, his eyes half open, dust and clots of blood drying on his brow. Occasionally they drip and make it difficult to see anything but a haze of mismatched realities and poorly composed dreams.

The fall had knocked the wind right out of him and he’s quick to doubt he’ll ever catch it again.

Maybe he deserves this? The concrete rumbles around him, fragile earth deteriorating beneath him. He tells himself he deserves it. He’s not a masochist, but he believes in a righteous sense of justice, not a divine punishment for his transgressions, but an ethereal presence balancing out the universe.

Or maybe he’s just got really shitty luck? The latter seems more formidable; he’d argue it in a court of law (he has, actually).

Still, sentiment has no place here. Not for him, at least. This whole construct is just one big sentimental ball of _bullshit_ that Ruvik either finds annoying or fucking hysterical and Sebastian isn’t sure which at this point. He’s waiting for a real bout of irony to smack him in the face before he makes that decision for himself.

A lot of things have smacked him in the face today, just not the real heavy handed poetic justice that even a dense ass like him couldn’t miss. Not yet.

But he presses a palm to his temple, like the metaphor had inflicted physical pain onto his being. Sweat and grease pass between the two surfaces; calloused skin sliding against itself as his hand falls to his side. Back nestled against the nearest grime covered wall, he repeats this process more than once before his breath is no longer scratching as furiously at the sides of his lungs and the persistent ache has settled into the marrow of his bones.

As his tired legs force his body into motion, suddenly all those years of smoking become a much more apparent mistake. He’d been aware what trouble it’d put him in when he’d first sucked down the carcinogen as a teen, but for some reason he thought the few years he’d quit somehow negated the years he hadn’t. To be fair, that’s not the dumbest notion he’s had today.

He swore his partner would make him quit again if they ever got out of this mess, which he stubbornly refuses to believe there’s a chance they won’t. He’s too pissed to let it go now.

No, the only thing he grips onto harder than survival is the revolver in his palm that’d been clasped so firmly for so long that it’s almost started taking up the shape of his fingers. One bullet left. He directs his attention to someone who isn’t there with a bitter scowl on his face as if he needs to show how un-humored he is by the irony of _one fucking bullet left._

His partner had almost showed him that one bullet is a lifetime supply if you’re desperate enough. That’s another thought that brings a sour bile back up from the base of his throat. For some reason he’s been under the impression that if he ignored what’s happened enough he’ll eventually forget it. Because none of these things that are happening are real anyway, so what makes attempted suicide any more tangible? He hasn’t put a name to it yet and somehow that makes it worse.

Sebastian knows that feeling: the desire not to die but to simply cease existing. He wipes his nose on the back of his palm, dragging his lantern off his belt to bring the light on level with his lips; it's warm glow crawls across the tattered stone walls and hugs the flecks of dust that he kicks up as he walks. In harmony, they dance around him as he descends deeper into hell.

Wanting to stop existing and wanting to die are two very different feelings, but they stem from the same neglect. Alcohol simulated what he assumed it felt like to dip into the void of death without actually killing himself. Because, no matter how close to the sun Icarus flew, he had no intention of flying close enough to wind up dead, just close enough to singe his feathers on the painful descent back to earth. Sebastian Castellanos does not want to die. Suicide is not an option.

Joseph Oda, on the other hand, absolutely wants to die. He did not want the world to disregard him and simply let him cease to exist, he wants to tear a hole in his brain and end it all. And Sebastian wants to help get Joseph his peace back without having to carve his best friends name on a tombstone, but as he delves deeper into the tunnels, a pit in his stomach begins to swell. The rationalist, the man who made the hard decisions, will be the one to kill his partner if that’s what it came to.

Wiping the corner of his eye, Sebastian proceeds to roll his neck to try and rid himself of a knot. It won’t come to that.

He doesn’t dwell on it, especially when he finds himself face to face with a stone wall that bars him from proceeding deeper into the tomb. Staring at it, staring at the carvings that gouge the front of it, he can’t help but fear the sinking pit of danger in his heart. Call it instinct, call it common sense, he traces his fingers over the indentations on the wall and is quick to consider the possibility of something even worse than the haunted skulking around down here.

He blinks twice and frowns, turning to the left to search for a way around this wall, even though it’s quite clearly a door. A door for what, he doesn’t know, but it obviously wants him to find the missing pieces and open it up. Whether it’s locking him out or keeping something in is the question he’s really worried about. He can sneak around and kill as many of these ghouls as he wants, he’s just learned that some things here take a little more firepower to coerce into submission than others, and firepower isn’t something he has.

Stone steps and ledges crumble beneath his weight as he crosses them; this place very well could have been ancient for all Sebastian knows (or cares), and the possibility of the whole thing crashing down does not relieve him of any stress, and stress is something he’s garnered way too fucking much of.

But he holds his own, treading light enough that he won’t immediately alert a threat, but heavy enough that he doesn’t lose the gall he’s got to be so damn persistent. He carries most of it in his shoulders, all the stress and courage and emotion -- that’s why they’re broad and why he slouches so much.  

The more he delves into the ruins, however, the more he remembers that this isn’t real. Every now and then he’ll forget, forget that he isn’t walking on solid ground or feeling real, tactile sensations. Because it all feels pretty fucking real, and thinking about it for longer than a moment makes his heart beat a little faster than he’s comfortable with.

The spikes protruding from the walls and the frequent death traps usually give it away. But that doesn’t make the threat of gas leaking through pipes any less real and any less concerning. What sort of place is this?   

_The church_ \-- that is the goal. And now where is he?  


	5. 8. Stand by (me)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sebastian rescues Kidman. Kinda.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> At this point i hope the flow makes even the remotest sense. (Ignore the first chapter number (the 5): this chapter takes place EIGHTH chronologically!)

Sebastian feels weightless again as he finds himself suddenly jolted back into his own consciousness. He hadn’t been stuck in that illusion world for very long, but it still feels strange to simply be brought back into the regular bowels of Ruvik’s mindscape with little more than his own willpower.

A quick glance down to his hands brings a confused expression across his features, however. It appears as if he’s been returned to the way he was before he got sucked into that abyss, and he is relieved to find himself back in his proper time period and out of that memory. But his hands are still covered in ash, which quickly assures him that he’s still stuck in the same fucking predicament.

He’s still stuck in STEM.

But there’s something different: there is no longer the vague ringing in the back of his ears. He inhales deeply, keeping his hands still at his sides though the dirt at his feet shifts slightly. In his bones, he can feel it; Ruvik’s influence on him is gone. In that one instant it simply vanished.

Where the madman’s disappeared to Sebastian doesn’t know.

But what he does know is that he’ll have to confront him again eventually. He couldn’t let a man like that simply continue existing, not in this world or the real one.

All he has to do is figure out how the hell to track someone like that down. Actually, first things first, where the hell is he.

He remembers chasing Kidman and then getting dragged into that memory, but he can’t tell you where he’s surfaced: everything has very quickly started to look the exact same. Though he feels it safe to assume he’s simply walked outside the station. Well, Ruvik’s twisted version of the station. It looks almost identical but Sebastian knows it isn’t.

He recognizes the street, the cars parked along the sides of the road, faint drizzle speckling the windows as he slowly takes it in. He misses Krimson more than he ever thought he could, misses the trash on the sidewalk and the busy city commuters. He’s spent so long lamenting it’s tragic state that he’s forgotten how much he simply enjoyed existing in it.

But before he has too long to sit around and think about what the hell he’s going to do, he hears something that draws him to action. _Gunshots_.

In a world like this, it becomes difficult to get a sense of yourself and find exactly which way you’re trying to go. But when he hears that ringing echo through the streets, he doesn’t hesitate to move towards the sound. And he finds it easy to leap into action, easy to move towards the sounds of danger rather than away like a sensible human being would do.

He doesn’t duck around corners, he just bolts, moves swiftly through the grime and viscera and collapsed concrete with little recognition of the turns he’s actually taking. He’s on a mission now; he can’t stand to sit still for more than a moment and now that he has a lead, he’s hopping on it as fast as possible.

He maneuvers into an alleyway, city composition shifting beneath him as he passes through a door and investigates the sounds further. Distant groaning and grumbling permeate the air, but it draws closer and closer with each inhale.

“Kidman!”

There she is, the junior detective herself, caught like a rat in a trap. She’s running for the fire escape with more than a dozen fiends on her heel and little chance for survival should they catch her. But the second he makes the mistake of calling out her name, suddenly their attention isn’t just sitting on her. 

Sebastian quickly finds himself face to face with the same hoard that was planning on tearing Kidman apart in the next second.

For a moment, they simply stare. Kidman takes shelter behind the door as the monsters’ angry palms scrape against the metal. But Sebastian doesn’t easily escape their eyes. Yet it’s almost like they don’t know what to make of him, and he doesn’t know what to make of them. The distinct fear he should be feeling at this moment doesn’t swell up inside his chest, only anxiety and what he would liken best to _insult_.

But when a swarm of growling monsters glares at you like that, you’re bound to be a little unnerved. How will they attack? What is their purpose in simply standing there, mocking him? Or are they doing something completely different that he’ too dull to catch onto? For all he knows, they have evil plans being filtered directly through their brains by Ruvik himself. Sebastian doesn’t know what to expect.

Or maybe (probably), they find the irony of this confrontation just as unusual as he does and don’t immediately know how to address it. Well, they sure do figure it out quick enough.

They abandon their pursuit of Kidman and go to lunge at the detective who, instinctively, leans backwards, raising an arm to protect his face. He can’t tell you why he bothered or why he doesn’t just turn around and move out of their way, but his feet are planted in that doorway, breath caged up by his ribs as he simply waits to see what’s going to happen.

And then the ceiling collapses.

In his bones, he felt this strange sense of knowing, as if he could have seen the structural support give in on itself before it actually happened. Yet there he is, staring at the crushed corpses of at least five haunted who’d simply walked under the cement as it’d fallen inwards.

“Holy shit!” And _there’s_ Sebastian's delayed response, appearing only after the dust had settled.

The luck of that occurrence felt entirely fake and he did not trust it. And it couldn’t have been just a coincidence either. It feels like something had rigged the room to cave at just that particular moment, leaving a massive plume of dust and debris to swell up around his form as he stands less than five feet from the fallout.

And then he remembers that he’s not exactly alone in here.

How the hell does he keep forgetting? All he has to do is look down to be reminded that he’s being toyed with; this situation is no exception.

“Kidman, they’re gone,” he musters, the timbre of his voice deep and throaty despite the obvious look of concern strewn across his face. He just can’t shake away that feeling in his gut. He knows what it is; he knows that bastard is just waiting to seize him and drag him back down, but he’s left waiting with his heart lodged in his gut anyway. Well, what’s left of his tattered heart at this point, anyway.

Kidman doesn’t immediately move. And probably with good reason. Their last encounter hadn’t exactly been… well, it hadn’t exactly ended well. She knows that Sebastian is on to her and she also knows how vengeful a man the detective could be. But she’s wrong if she assumes he’ll outright kill her for that. Despite the changes, he’s still a detective and he still has the innate desire to get to the bottom of this mystery.

“Kidman -- _Juli_ , it’s me, ok? It’s just me. What you said to Joseph was right. But you know I didn’t have any choice in this. We have to figure this out before shit hits the fan again. I don’t know how much time I have.”

His expression crumples as he turns his attention onto the door, lip quirking up in an odd manner while one brow is raised. He doesn’t know if his words mean anything to her. But deep down, he wants to believe she hasn’t just been using them the whole time.

“How do I know this isn’t a trick?” Kidman pushes the door aside and confronts him, fingers clenched tightly at her side. She knows a door won’t protect her much so she stared down her accuser with all the bravado she can muster.

“It’s just not. Can you trust me on that?”

She frowns. “No.”

“I should be the one who can’t trust you, alright? I have given you every _fucking_ chance here, Kid. Every fucking chance to make things right --”

But he cuts himself off and swallows his words. There’s a fire burning in his chest, blazing brighter and brighter until it’s crawled up the back of his throat and set his tongue aflame. So he swallows it down and lets it settle back into a meager glow in the dark. He can’t let his temper get the best of him. Not when she’s the only seemingly sane person left and he can’t even trust himself.

“After everything that’s happened, you’re still surprised I find it hard to trust you? To trust anyone?” Kidman crosses her arms over her chest, diverting her attention from Sebastian elsewhere. She tries to relax her posture, but she remains tense anyway. “I didn’t mean for it to come to this. If I had it my way, no one would have had to know… how did you even find out?”

“He told me,” Sebastian answers with a half guilty sigh, staring down at his hands.

“ _He_ told you? And you just… you throw around trust so much, he is the last person you should put your faith in!”

“He promised me everything, Kid! I didn’t think I had a choice! This machine… at the end of the day, it’s going to be _his_. God forbid I want back everything they took from me; god forbid I try and use it for what it was intended to be!”

Kid bites back her own words, but the genuine disgust for Sebastian’s actions was apparent. Hell, Sebastian is pretty disgusted with himself.

“I got scared, alright? I should have been there to stop him from saying that shit to you and Joseph but I couldn’t. He promised to give me my life back, ok? What would you give for that?”

Kidman does not respond and Sebastian knows why. He doesn’t even need STEM to tell him Kidman is like him. He sees so much of himself in her, the way she walks, the way she holds herself, the way she flinches slightly at even the most sincere physical contact. Kidman and he have that in common: they both come from shit. Except Sebastian had escaped all that, escaped a garbage lifestyle and the abusive hand that fed him. Kidman just ran away. She never found her home. She’s fighting for it right now.

“Ruvik wants to use Leslie as a host,” is Kidman’s eventual response, attention still targeted on the floor as her fingers grip the dirty fabric covering her arm. “That’s what he’s after.”

“I figured that kid was important to his escape…” Sebastian trails off, a sickly feeling suddenly swelling up in his abdomen. “How? How does he plan on using him?”

“They’re… compatible. Leslie’s _open mindedness_ coupled with their shared histories --”

“Wait, what?” Sebastian cuts her off, suddenly very attentive to everything she has to say. “Are you… Leslie is a blank slate then, right?”

“Not… exactly. At least that’s not how I think it works. He’s just… very receptive.”

“But Ruvik is going to possess this kid? Because of their… shared histories? Are they related or something?”

“No, they both experienced a similar emotional trauma, which is why Ruvik will be able to use him…” Kidman trails off, staring at the detective as he seems to be swallowed by his own trail of thought. It’s only then that she realizes she’s probably divulged too much.

“Kidman, we need to save that boy. We can’t let him escape. Even if he traps me here forever, we can’t let _him_ escape with Leslie --”

_“You cannot keep me here.”_

_“Fuck,”_ Sebastian quickly shakes his head as those pervasive thoughts creep in again. The ghost is trying to wheedle it’s way back into his mind, trying to turn him back into that thing. But Sebastian is not so eager to give in. Not while there’s so much on the line here.

Kidman simply stares, unsure of how to size Sebastian up at this point. He wants to believe that she genuinely has no intentions of anyone getting hurt, and he wants to believe that even after all this bullshit, she’s still willing to trust him now. But he hasn’t exactly been an exceptional role model as of late…

“I shouldn’t have told you that, should I?” Kidman questions, though her tone makes it sound more like a statement than a question… she shifts her weight onto one leg, dropping her hands to her side as she looks him over, waiting for something awful to happen.

_“He’s mine.”_

Again, Sebastian winces, but does not cave. “No, I needed to know. We can’t let anyone use this kid to escape.”

Sebastian is determined, but Kidman doesn’t hold the same confidence. Her brow twitches nervously now and then, fingers clenching into fists at her side. She always was ready for a fight.

“...You don’t want it anymore. What he offered you.” Kidman isn’t a quiet woman. She just rarely speaks. No, she’s even tempered, and when she does speak, it’s plain and to the point.

Just then, she spoke softly.

“...No. It wouldn’t be real. I just have this sinking feeling he’s going to give it to me anyway. He already tried once.”

“And you’d do anything to stop him? Even stay trapped here with Ruvik?”

“Yes.”

Silence. That has become somewhat of a theme here, hasn’t it? Deep and meaningful conversations, intermittent with long, painful bouts of silence. It’s unavoidable, it’s heavy, and it’s starting to leave a bad taste in Sebastian’s mouth. Or he assumes it will.

Because here’s Kidman, the woman he’d accidentally started treating like a daughter, quietly deciding whether or not she can believe any of the words coming out of his mouth. He can’t say he wouldn’t blame her if she said no, but he also can’t say that he wouldn’t understand her reasons.

“I’m sorry, Sebastian. I shouldn’t have dragged you into this.”

“Kid, _please_ \--”

“I can’t let him try and stop me through you. I’m sorry.”

Kidman unholsters her gun.

It’s only fitting that the silence be ended with a gunshot.


	6. 3. Imprisoned

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There's a trap within a trap. Trapception.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Do these chapter jumps make any sense??? Who knows! This is the section just before the Keeper fight, if that wasn't clear. (Ignore the first chapter number (the 6): this chapter takes place THIRD chronologically!)

_Beneath it._ Ten minutes of exploring tells him that and he doesn’t even need to be a detective to pull that assumption together. Sebastian is neither here nor there when it comes to religion, but this place aches with such sinister intent he can’t tell if it’s meant to strike the fear of god into an unholy man or drive sinners like him away all together. It does a little bit of both, if he’s frank, and he makes a silent shout out to Jesus Christ. You know. Just in case.

Still, the evils of these catacombs are not well masked. The haunted writhe in their own torment, loudly expressing their distaste. It doesn’t matter that Sebastian can hear them lurking around each corner; it doesn’t matter that subtlety isn’t one of their strong suits. Their lives in and of themselves are fabrications -- Sebastian doesn’t even know if they have real sentience anymore. And as such, they don’t give a shit if they’re throwing their lives away.

Some of them were criminals. Some had deserved it. Some didn’t.

Sebastian wipes the sweat from his brow; it’s hot as all hell down here and doesn’t seem to be getting any better. He can feel the fabric of his shirt plaster itself to his back, making his body feel heavier than it actually is. Not to mention the air reeks of death and rot and he’s certain the scent his own body is giving off is not helping.

But the odor is the least of his concerns. For a while, survival’s been all he could even comprehend, but given a moment to simply breathe, his palette is suddenly full of a lot more to worry about. Are his partners OK? Can he trust Joseph alone with himself? Is Kidman capable enough to handle herself and Leslie? And what about Ruvik? What is he trying to gain from all this?

Sebastian is a simple man, not a dull one, but one keen on rationalizing any and all situations that should present themselves. But this situation? How is he supposed to make sense of this?

The rough tips of his fingers graze the nearest wall, just to prove that the stone is tangible. If he thinks too much on the situation, he starts to worry he’ll fall through the floor at any given moment; is any of this real? Should he be worried that he’ll collapse into the abyss at any given second?

He should be, but he isn’t. He pushes the thought of complete, spontaneous incineration to the back of his mind and pretends that the laws of the physical world still apply here. To some extent, they do. To another, he’s just phased through the floor and fallen forty feet to what should have been his death, only to roll over and come out relatively unscathed.

Still, he’s haunted by the possibility and is eager to shove the idea deep, deep into the back of his mind, to a place he only touches when he’s so drunk he can’t feel the pressure of it on the back of his skull.

Other, more pressing things are haunting him anyway: literal things, tangible things that can actually hurt him. The bright-eyed, zombie-like horrors have slowly become the least of his worries. The stone door had made him wary of a bigger threat lurking around these halls, but only brief glimpses of that threat have been caught. Hell, he can’t even tell if the monster he’s seeing is really there or not. That’s kind of this nightmare’s specialty.

But in his hands he holds the last piece if the puzzle: a chunk of stone the size of his head and about as heavy. It’d been one hell of an adventure getting these pieces to open this door, and he can’t say that he’s all too thrilled to have finally achieved this goal, but as the faint hum of Clair de Lune echoes around the corner, he knows he isn’t far from the truth he’s going to be forced to face sooner or later.

He doesn’t cut his stride, simply approaches the wall barring him from progressing further and fits the tablet into it’s designated hole in one simple motion. No fuss, no change of expression on his face. Though, when the gears start grinding, he can feel a pit drop into his stomach. A new pit, at least, an addition to the twenty other already loitering in his gut.

Honestly, he thought there’d be more… something? The stone wall doesn’t even shake the ground as it raises, no hoard of haunted lunging for his throat, no fireworks, no explosions, no trip wires being set up. Just a set of stairs revealed unto him.

A cautious breath is sucked into his lungs; he knows if he stops or takes break it’ll only hinder how committed he is to getting this all over with, so he opts to let his legs keep moving while he still has the momentum. He descends down the stairs into further darkness, waiting for something awful to happen.

He’s barely made it five seconds before he’s greeted with another door, this one putting on slightly more of a show. As his lantern dimly illuminates the symbol of the church on the massive metal barrier, the two bars that keep it locked in place click and release; the ground shuddering beneath it as it begins to lift off the floor in recognition of his presence.

There’s a brief recess as he stares down the long hall lain in from of him; his eyes have barely drawn upwards before the loud thud of metal on metal averts his attention back to the end of the hall.

There it is, that _thing_. He’s seen it before and assumed it was just a figment of his imagination but he should have known better. The irony of this place keeps punching him in the face and he keeps asking himself how it’s possible that he hasn’t learned yet, but the question doesn’t make that thing any less real.

A monster, huge, smacking a hammer against the side of it’s head. It’s head, which is, coincidentally, in the shape of a _safe_.

Rapidly his attention shifts back upwards at the slightest glint of metal; the ceiling is lined with massive, protruding spikes that would maim him horribly if so much as one fell atop his form. And there are at least a hundred, all packed together in squares.

It’s a trap.

He tries to keep his composure intact, gently stepping backwards for fear that sudden movements will send the whole place crumbling down. But one quiet step leads to another less quiet step; as he backs up, he finds himself caught in another trap within the trap.

The wire springs up around his leg, barbs piercing through his pants as his immediate struggle proves to only worsen the situation. And of course the second that trap is sprung, the spikes on the wall begin to slam violently down to the floor.

Knife is free less than seconds later, his instinct rapidly kicking in like a fire in his stomach, surging up to give him the adrenaline to actually try and cut himself loose. The dust kicked up by the falling of the spikes gets closer and closer to his person until he can feel the debris throw flecks at his skin.

It’s with seconds to spare that he actually manages to escape, immediately turning to bolt back up the stairs and to the stone door puzzle he’s just unlocked. But as his lantern cuts the darkness, he finds himself face to face with the back of the door, trapped down in the catacombs with this monster on the other end of the hall.

At least it can’t get passed those spikes that’ve just been dropped, right?

Sebastian holds his breath as his attention returns to the trap he’s just narrowly escaped. Just as quickly as they’d fallen, the spikes begin to rise again, chains tugging them back up to their resting position with a loud, angry rattle of chains pulling on chains.

And yet, at the other end of the hall, the monster is gone again.

It doesn’t sit well in the detective’s stomach, but he forces his legs to move him back, back to the spike trap he’d just walked into. The only way out is through that exit at the other end of the hall, and he’s already sprung the trap, so he should be safe for the time being, right?

Detective Castellanos, do you ever get tired of being wrong all the fucking time?

The very moment he clears the first row of spikes, they fall to the floor behind him with a rather aggressive _thud_. Which, as any good detective would concur, is a really fucking bad sign. There’s about a five second span of time where he simply stares, dumbfounded, because he’d sort of assumed this place wouldn’t make him deal with the same bullshit more than once. Like, it couldn’t be more creative? Maybe switch up the traps every now and then?

And then he remembers he’s about two steps away from getting crushed to death.

Again, he’s quick on his feet, sprinting down the hall towards his only hope for escape. He doesn’t even feel the ache in his legs anymore, not when he’s sprinting for his life, narrowly avoiding getting caught in another wire trap. It’ll never feel routine, exactly, but he’s definitely gotten used to existing in a constant state of terror.

But just like that, it’s over again.

He reaches the end of the hall and a door equal to the one at the beginning closes behind him. All that fuss over the span of five minutes. Maybe less. Five minutes of horror and it’s settled back into alarming silence once again.

This place is fucking nuts.

But you get out of the frying pan and right into the fire again; he takes barely a step to the left around a corner and a totally new obstacle makes itself apparent.

“Leslie, you’re safe. Where’s--” Sebastian doesn’t immediately recognize what he’s looking at. A grungy light barely illuminates the scene and the detective only confirms his assumption when he’s close enough to the boy to confirm it’s actually him.

Leslie is stuck in a cage of some sort, pacing around like he has the tendency to do. And Sebastian is more than relieved that the boy is alive. It’s like this world is giving him another chance, a chance to protect someone that can’t protect themself. But it only takes a second of acknowledgement for Sebastian to realize that someone is missing.

“...Kid… kid…” Leslie begins to echo Sebastian’s thoughts, his thin fingers trembling as they grasped at each other.

“Kidman? Is she here too?” Sebastian urges Leslie to speak up, desperate for any validation that he isn’t surviving in this hellhole alone. His weight is leaned towards the bars that keep him out, but Leslie is about as responsive as he’d expected.

“...Kid… kid…”

“Is she alright?” And now his hands are clasping around the cold metal bars, shaking their frame lightly as he pushes harder for an answer than Leslie was probably willing to take. Kidman is Sebastian’s responsibility. She’s young, inexperienced, and Sebastian is supposed to make sure she’s ok. She isn’t supposed to be here at all, she doesn’t deserve this. And Sebastian can’t stand the thought of losing her too--

“...is she alright…? ... all right?”

The detective should have known better. Leslie is his responsibility now too, just like Kidman. The boy can barely process what’s happening to him, and Sebastian knows the kid can’t help him but he’ll just sort of hope that...

“Stand back. I’ll get it open.”

Leslie doesn’t move, but Sebastian hadn’t expected him to anyway.

With the blunt end of his gun, Sebastian is able to bash the chain enough that it gives way, releasing it’s meager grip on the gate that held the boy. Swinging it wide open, Leslie is surprisingly eager to escape the confines of the cell. As in, Sebastian had never seen Leslie move so adamantly.

“...Get it open…” he repeats to himself, fingers still clutched together in his dirty grasp. ‘It’, in this case, is another gate that bars them from proceeding. But with Leslie so caught up in his own terror, Sebastian doesn’t expect him to be much assistance.

So he takes it upon himself to walk towards the crank that holds the gate shut, wrapping his palms around the rusty metal, only cranking it once he’s got a pretty good grip on it. It’s heavy, but the chain pulley lightens the load and only a few grunts are exhaled as he forces the barrier off the ground.

“...Get it open… get it open…” Leslie repeats, almost in chorus. Except this time, his words are accompanied by a familiar ringing that slowly rises in pitch until it’s nearly forcing the detective to release his grasp on the crank.

Leslie fidgets in place for barely a second before he takes off, bolting under the gate Sebastian has managed to lift a moment ago. He runs, despite all the detective’s shouts and warnings, under the gate and down a set of stairs where he successfully sets off an alarm.

There isn’t enough time for Sebastian to get to the gate before a massive sheet of metal slides down over top of it, keeping him from pursuing the boy he’s had in his sights for barely a minute. But that only makes the loss all the more painful; he’s literally been thinking, not a moment ago, how he has to try harder and protect this kid this time around. And he’s already fucked it up.

Incredible.

“Leslie!” That doesn’t stop him from balling up a fist and slamming it against the door anyway, as if that’ll somehow lift it up and bring the kid back to his side. If only his voice had that ability.

Yet as the alarm blares behind him and he notices the lingering sense of dread in his gut surface again, he immediately begins to wonder if Leslie isn’t better off for having made it out of there.

Slowly, he relinquishes his body to turn around, vision scattering violently in passing as he tries to focus on the thing materializing in front of him.

It’s the monster. The one with the safe for a head and a hammer in hand. And it’s staring (staring? can he call it that?) down a small strip of floor at him. He assumes it’d have murder in it’s eyes if it… had eyes.

There’s no long hall to protect him now, nowhere to run or hide either. It’s just him, his heart lodged in his throat, and this thing walking towards him getting ready to bring it’s weapon down on him. Hard.


	7. 7. Nostalgia

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Holy shit, we're fucking time travelling.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one might be confusing, just bear with me. It involves Sebastian reliving an old memory. (This one... is actually in the right spot. This chapter takes place SEVENTH chronologically!)

Sebastian can’t lie to himself and say he’s never experienced a time where he’s woken up and had no idea where he was. This time is just a little different. 

It only takes a minute for him to remember what had just transpired, but he’d kind of hoped it’d been a figment of his imagination. That would have been the greatest relief: to wake up in his own bed. Hell, he could have woken up with a knife pierced directly through his ribcage and he probably would have been cool with that. Get some coffee and walk it off. Mondays, am I right?

But he doesn’t, and he can’t. When his eyes flicker open, there is initially nothing but a haze over his vision, a fog that makes the shapes around him distort into something else. He rolls his head, half convinced he can just pull the covers up over himself and go back to sleep. But there are no covers, just him leaning back into the chair of someplace he’ll recognize as soon as his vision pulls itself together again.

“What the fuck…” he mutters, drawing in a groggy breath as the incident that’d just passed slowly drags it’s ass back into his memory. “...right.”

Instinctively, he tilts his head upwards to examine the ceiling: no massive black hole. So how’d he get here? He remembers falling into that hole when he’d been chasing Kidman and then…

Fuck. Where’s Kidman?

He stands up and raises a hand to run his fingers across his temple before he thinks better of it. Instead, he finds himself staring out into a room that is more than vaguely familiar.

“KCPD…” he once again finds himself muttering under his breath. But this can’t be the real KCPD. He’d love to believe that all of STEM is just his imagination, but it isn’t, and he won’t be so quick to believe that any of this is real. As it turns out, there is some merit in being stubborn as all hell.

But there is no doubt in the fact that this is an exact replica of the Krimson City Police Department and he is standing in a perfect double of his office. The computer on his desk lights up with the logo of the department and there remains his stack of cinema magazines neatly piled one on top of each other at the edge of his desk. Even the ash tray only has one butt smothered into it. This is a different era altogether.  

“Hey, Sebastian,” the door creaks open and the elder detective instinctively jumps into defense mode, breath half catching in the back of his throat. “Oh, uh, I should have knocked first, shouldn’t I?”

Sebastian doesn’t respond, he simply stares, dumbstruck at the sight of his partner completely unscathed standing in his doorway. But it’s impossible--he’d last seen his partner in the STEM labs, and he hadn’t exactly left him in good condition.

Yet here he is, all bright eyed, smooth skinned and… with bangs?

“No… you’re fine?” Sebastian questions, eyes still slimmed into slivers as his brow narrows sharply. What exactly is this? Why is he talking to a younger version of his partner here, in a replica of the KCPD?

Then it dawns on him.

His attention immediately shoots down to his hands, but all he sees is his normal skin and bones. And a part of him is ecstatic to find that he’s safe in his own body. But he’s only happy for a second before the confusion sets in again; why the hell is he wearing something different than he had put on this morning?

_Holy shit, we’re fucking time travelling._

“I got the tour for about the fifth time, I just wanted to… actually no, I don’t know what I was going to do,” Joseph continues, obviously ignoring the borderline terrified expression on Sebastian’s face. That being said, Joseph is also flush with color, as if he were embarrassed by something? No, that isn’t embarrassment, it’s something else… It doesn’t matter what it is, he offers half a laugh and continues anyway. “Well, tomorrow is my actual first day. I guess I just wanted to say that I was looking forward to this opportunity to work with you.”

_Holy shit, this is the first day he’d met Joseph. This is nine years ago._

_Holy fucking shit._

“Krimson City is lucky to have you,” Sebastian improvises, trying to remember what he’d even said. He’s not even sure that’s what Joseph said. Nine years is a long time. If this is supposed to be a memory of his, it probably isn’t a very accurate one.

“Well, I hope I don’t let anyone down on that.”

“Don’t hope, Joseph. Just prove me right.”

Joseph nods rather politely in response, a proud smile still dawned on his features. But his brow wrinkles in an odd way and his eyes are glassy, occasionally flickering with light. He’s happy but… there’s something else, something that Sebastian just can’t place.

“Well, I’m not holding you here by the collar. You can go home, detective,” Sebastian prompts, mortified expression quickly shifting into something curious. There was just something wrong about this conversation, something he knows wasn’t there before.

“Y-yeah, haha,” Joseph responds eventually, only with a mild stutter. He rubs the back of his neck, standing in the doorway without moving for a long time.

Joseph had been nervous about the job at first, but so was everyone. That just comes with the territory of starting a new job and meeting new people. But had he been this nervous? So nervous that he could hardly make eye contact with Sebastian?

“What? Is the captain hounding you about something already?” And now Sebastian is digging; why would this memory be different? Why is something wrong here?

_“Just let it go, Sebastian.”_

“Sorry, did you say something, Joseph?”

“What? Oh, yeah I just said that the captain seems like a… strict woman. But no, of course not! I’m not in the doghouse yet.”

“Good, you wanna stay on the right side of her...” Sebastian pauses, looking down at his desk for a moment. The light outside is thinning, but the office is still drenched in a bright orange glow. “You’re not… worried about working with me, are you?”

_“Sebastian, stop thinking. Let it go.”_

“What? No, of course not! Why would I be scared?”

The detective stops moving entirely, attention snapping onto his partner. The illusion is falling apart.

“I didn’t ask you if you were scared, Joseph.”

He’s staring. Staring at Joseph. Because Joseph is staring at him and it feels like neither of them know what else to do.

“I… did I say something out of line?” Joseph questions, finally shattering the silence. Well, no, that wasn’t the right word to use. He didn’t shatter the silence at all, he’d carefully placed it onto the ground and tapped it lightly so that it’d fall over.

“This… isn’t real, is it? No, I fucking knew it, why’d I play along when I knew this wasn’t real?”

“Sebastian what are you… talking about? I’m confused.” The young detective chimes in, obviously flustered by Sebastian’s sudden rambling.

“You aren’t real. This isn’t fucking real. Just stop talking while I try and…” And now he’s just exasperated. How did he get himself here? Where exactly is here? And how is he supposed to get out?

_“Sebastian, please just accept it.”_

“No, fuck you!”

“Sebastian, what’s… gotten into you?” Joseph looks scared now, and rightly so. But Sebastian can’t let this falsified mockery of his friend keep parading around in that skin.

“No, you can’t keep me trapped in here! You can’t… what did… what happened to Joseph? And Kidman? Where are they?”

_“Sebastian they’re right here with you.”_

“Sebastian just tell me what’s going on--”

“No, you shut the fuck up. I’m busy right now.”

If anyone on the outside were to question this situation, they’d assume Sebastian had lost his mind. But he hasn’t. Not yet at least. No, right now, Sebastian knows exactly what’s going on.

“This _asshole_ is keeping me _buried_ down here. Buried deep, deep down. Because he knows I’ll get in the way. Son of a bitch.” And now he’s almost completely ignoring the fact that Joseph is in the room with him. Because he’s 90% positive that’s not even the real Joseph, just a mirage Sebastian had built from memory. This is obviously a fake. Not what Sebastian had wanted at all.

If Sebastian could have the real KCPD back and his real partner by his side, that’d be enough at this point. But instead he gets _this_ : a memory from nine years ago when he first met his partner. A memory. And not even an accurate one.

But this fucking _ghost_ of a man is keeping him down here so he can’t interfere. Because Sebastian’s instinct is stronger than expected; he can do more than just stop Ruvik. So he built this world for Sebastian to mingle in and keep him occupied. The detective had tugged too hard on his leash when he’d tried to get information from Kidman and now… now he’s here.

So Sebastian had to break the illusion, had to dig his way out of this hole and get back to himself.

Whatever was left of himself to get back to.

Shoulders tensed, he nearly knocks his chair back when he moves from behind his desk, pushing past the image of Joseph into the hub of the KCPD. Joseph stands like a deer caught in the headlights in the doorway to Sebastian’s office; he doesn’t even turn around to see if his partner tries to follow suit.

What’s the best way to get out of here? Obviously he has to fight back, but the entire concept doesn’t make much sense to him. This feels like a real construct, but… that isn’t true.

“Sebastian, you’re really acting weird,” Joseph finally interrupts, catching up to his partner as he passes the younger man's desk.

“Look, I know you’re not real. You’re just here to complete the illusion. But I’m going to keep talking to you because I like the company,” Sebastian nods at the mirage, but otherwise grants him no more looks. “Kidman knows something she’s not telling us. And when I tried to find out, I wound up here. But why would he want to stop me from finding out what she knows? No… it’s not that he doesn’t want me to know he just… what is it? Why did he put me here?”

_“You’re responsible for getting yourself in here.”_

“See, there’s that asshole again! I never should have taken his bait but I just… for a fucking second I thought he could actually make it real. And here I am, looking at you, reliving this memory, and genuinely wondering if he could at least… make something similar. I’m a fucking moron.“

Joseph doesn’t respond, he simply stares. Maybe the doppelganger has finally realized that Sebastian doesn’t give a shit about what he says and has finally relented to being a glorified pair of ears? Who knows.

“It doesn’t matter. I have to get out of here. I have to make things right.”

For a while, the two men simply stare at each other. Sebastian wants Joseph to just give him a solution to all his problems but he knows that isn’t going to happen. Especially not with this falsified construct of his partner. Sebastian has to get back to his real partner, apologize for what he’s done, what he was going to do, make things right. Or at least try. Joseph deserves some peace after all this.

“This was a pretty good memory though. Sorry I fucked it all up.”

There is no reply.

Sebastian keeps his back turned away from the other man, walking towards the exit with his shoulders still wrought with tension. But he exhales a loud sigh, closing his eyes for a passing moment before he collects his resolve, pushing the door open to be welcomed by an abysmal darkness and the faint glow of fire in the distance.


	8. 4. Luck

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sebastian has to fight the Keeper and it's about as fun as you would imagine.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I like this one a lot, I don't know. (Ignore the first chapter number (the 8): this chapter takes place FOURTH chronologically!)

Sebastian's heart lodges itself in his throat, choking the air right out of him. He gasps on dust and dirt, the contents of his brain stirring around in his skull like a cocktail; it makes him want to vomit.

But he drags his heavy limbs from the ground and collects himself nonetheless. Every time he took a hit in life he came back more and more deteriorated, but he came back anyway. He always came back. This isn’t any different. There’s an obstacle in his path but he’ll come back.

Sebastian Castellanos always comes back.

Feet press between him and the floor, weight pushed forward and around the corner of metal bars that obscure his enemy from him. He nearly falls on his face again, but the cage becomes his support, scarred palms clamping against the structure to pull his mass upright.

Fuck.

There is one thought running through his brain, but it fires like an automatic rifle at speeds that make it feel like no less than one-thousand and one thoughts. This monster wants him dead, and if it follows Ruvik’s commanding work ethic, it won’t cease until he is.

Sebastian doesn’t really know how to run from a fight; when the fight or flight response kicks in, his head never really registers the option of running away. But this situation is different. Every other fight he’s ever gotten in, he’d stood a chance. Now he’s just some asshole with one fucking bullet in his revolver being chased down by an even bigger asshole with a safe for a head. He isn’t exactly in a position to be careless with his decisions.

Raising a sleeve to his mouth, he takes a big inhale and buries it deep in his lungs, tensing the muscles in his legs before he makes the split second decision to bolt. Just in time too -- the second he forces himself from his hiding spot, the devil’s mallet impales the stone beneath where he’d stood. The ground rattles, debris kicked into the air as Sebastian ducks out of the way. Fingers press against the floor; with effort, he launches himself back into a standing position so that he can garner some ground between himself and his opposition.

This isn’t good, no part of this is good. And the more he runs, the more he narrowly avoids getting his head bashed in, the harder it is to breath, the harder it is to inflate his lungs beyond the point of ache.

And that ache only deepens when the gas is released. Initially he only grants for a cough, but quickly it’s swelling inside his lungs, completely withering the inside of his throat. He feels floaty, like he weighed less than he had before, but his limbs ragdoll and make it much harder to coordinate.

Shaking his head, he blinks rapidly to pull himself back together. This thing, whatever it is, has released some kind of toxin into the air and made Sebastian’s fight for survival all that much more difficult.

Soon the smog obscures the floor from his view, but he can still see enough in front of him to keep going, to keep running from the threat that can’t be more than ten feet behind him at any given time. There has to be a way out of here, a way to shut off this gas and escape. And he won’t give up until he finds it.

The walls begin to duplicate themselves. At least that’s what his eyes are telling him he sees. Every single turn he takes feels like it’s leading him in a circle, and it’s far too long before he realizes he has in fact been running in a circle. But the ceiling drips with vibrant neon hues and the stone that surrounds him is cold to the touch despite the fact that it looks like it just caught on fire; every turn he takes looks different even though it feels the same.

Running is getting harder and harder; he’s practically slowed to a jog by this point and he can barely keep his head up. The determined groans just behind him drive him forward, but his depth perception is so off that that safe-headed monster could be right on top of him and Sebastian wouldn’t be able to tell.

Fingers trail over a pipe for support until he’s dragged himself into another room that looks more like an abstract painting than a structure with four walls. But the second he crosses the threshold, a shaky leg gives out and he rolls onto the floor, a much needed gasp of breath forced out of his windpipe as he crashes onto his back.

Down here he can barely see anything but the warped ceiling lingering above him. But the ground vibrates beneath him and he knows there’s no time to sit and collect his lost breath. Damn if it doesn’t hurt, though. He can’t swallow the spit down the back of his throat that’s been rubbed raw, and his head pounds so loud it makes his body feel completely detached; he doesn’t even feel in control of his limbs anymore.

What he does manage to do is roll over, pull himself onto his stomach and begin dragging himself to what seems like a hopeless attempt at freedom. His eyes follow the line drawn out by the pipe he’d used for support. It’s hard to see, but he knows it’ll lead him to whatever crank he needs to twist to cut off the flow of this toxic shit, so he once again forces his feet between himself and the floor, clawing at the wall just to stand up.

He blinks rapidly in an attempt to clear the burning, but nothing suffices. Weak legs drag him forward, ear drums banging against his brain in rhythm with the beat of his heart. He has to ignore the pain, has to ignore everything that’s dragging him down, has to force himself off the ground again because the valve that stands between him and death by toxic gas is four feet above him.

His body shakes, head tossed from one side to the other as he reaches as far as he can for anything to grab on to. The strength in his arms wavers, but he forces himself back into a sitting position with a pained grunt and an expulsion of much coveted air.

And then the thud that’d been following him by a few meager feet is standing right next to him.

Amber irises burn as they widen in fear, exposing them to more of the carcinogen. But he doesn’t notice. All he notices is that fucking mallet. That giant, fucking, spiked mallet that’s nearly sent him to the grave more times than once. And now the vivid image of it crushing every bone in his body has decided to replay over and over again in the back of his mind.

Sebastian holds his breath, nails scraping the tiled ground beneath his dirty palms. It feels like an eternity he’s staring at that thing, eyes bright and glassy. It feels like an eternity he’s waiting there to die.

But when the monster raises it’s hammer to beat down the detective, the sound of bones crushing isn’t heard. Only a single gunshot.

It’s targeted precisely. And since he’s on the floor, he’s given the perfect angle of entry: right up through the neck.

He can’t tell you what he hit, only that it sends the monster reeling. A roar echoes inside the metal confines of it’s safe, sharp pangs of pain ricocheting off of each other as it’s weapon rattles the ground upon contact and the creature steps back to collect itself.

Sebastian knows that won’t kill it, which is why he musters every single bit of strength he has left in his limbs to push himself off the ground, to drop his weight into turning that wheel, to fight for his existence with everything that thirty-eight years of being alive has built. He can hear the pipe begin to close, the gas begin to thin if only by a small fraction with every exhausting twist of the valve.

But it’s working. No matter how much it hurts, it’s working.

His vision is so far beyond hazy he swears he can hear colors. There’s a word for that, he knows, but that’s not his concern at the moment. Sweat passes between his skin and the hot metal beneath his fingers, gasping breath clutching at the air and dragging it in eagerly even if it chafes the sides of his throat and hastens the intake of toxin. He is beyond the point of caring about anything but the slim chance of survival so he claws at it ferociously, heart pounding with such great force against his ribcage that he hardly even notices when his sternum cracks in half.

Wait.

Shit.

That wasn’t supposed to --

_\-- but it did._

For a second, he is only cognitive enough to recognize the fact that his hands are no longer in contact with the heated metal of the valve. But his fingers, numb as they may be, continue blindly clutching at the air as if he could somehow reach the pipe from his position, once again tossed to the floor like a sack of bricks.

His only hope for escape sits idle some feet off the ground, mocking him with its slightly askew orientation. And though it waves and melts through the distortion of his vision, it’s clear enough for him to hate himself for getting pulled away.

And then it hurts.

Emotionally at first. Then mentally. And finally, but certainly not least, physically. Definitely not least. Oh! The second that thing’s hammer made contact with his chest he should have known! But he hadn’t felt it until his spine had smacked against the hard ground, until his ribs had shattered inside his chest and started piercing the soft tissues and muscles of his innards.

The slightest shift to the side and he’s expelling blood from between his lips. He feels that one! It’s savage! And his mouth gapes, trying to suck in any breath that’ll greet his windpipe only to find the doors closed. The monster’s brute force has lodged a rib right in one of Sebastian’s lungs; it quickly fills with blood and begins to suffocate him.

Sebastian Castellanos is killing himself from the inside.

Nails crack as his palm splays on the stone floor; he’s using all his strength to try and claw his way away from the safe-headed monster that looms over him, even though his muscles scream that it’s fruitless.

Another swing of the hammer crushes his right hand and he’s left to croak a breathless cry as no sound but a pained echo accompanied by a splash of blood escapes the back of his throat. His wrist explodes the second the spiked metal contacts his flesh; it rips the skin apart and minces the thin layer of muscle beneath, crushing the bones they held together far beyond repair.

And then the monster does the same thing to his left hand.

Sebastian’s eyes are practically glowing gold at this point, pupils constricting and dilating rapidly after each failed breath. But their sheen comes from the thin layer of salty water that begins spilling out from the corners of his eyes. He’s breathless and in more physical pain than any human being should ever or could ever endure. And the tears and blood pooled together as the haze of his vision began to clear somehow.

Why is this happening? Why isn’t he dead? Does this thing have some kind of grudge against him? It’s obviously of Ruvik’s creation, but shouldn’t it have just brought him to his grave by now instead of looming over him like a fucking vulture?

“Do you wish you’d saved that last bullet now, Sebastian?”

Suddenly, the detective is completely aware of why he’s still alive.

“Do Joseph’s words make a little more sense? You didn’t give him enough credit, did you?”

Sebastian wants to scream, wants to lash out and fight back against the hooded man that stood beside his monster, looking almost tenderly down at the pitiful mass of bruised and torn up flesh that Sebastian had become.

But he can’t.

Small pockets of air squeeze their way into his slowly shriveling lungs and his limbs feel dead and foreign to him now. His eyes are the only structures still functioning, and they train on Ruvik like a military sniper’s aim.

“It really is a shame they dragged you into this. I honestly couldn’t have cared less what became of you, but… I’m genuinely surprised this is where you’re meeting your end. Are you surprised?”

No, he’s not. Sebastian no longer has the capacity to be surprised. Why? Because every single atom and electron in his body has set itself on fire; he is physically incapable of feeling anything other than burning, murderous, hatred. 

It doesn’t come on quickly, no, it doesn’t sneak up on him by surprise. It’s a slow ember burning in his chest that begins to swell and taint every single piece of his insides. He stares at the man responsible for this mess, the face that he can place the death of countless people, the disappearance of his wife, the murder of his daughter, even his own untimely elimination and he feels nothing but _hatred_.

He wants Ruvik dead.

And it shows. Even through the bruises and blood and sweat and tears and shattered pride, it glows through his mangled visage like a star about to go supernova. And do you know how Ruvik responds to this display of anger?

He fucking smiles.

He fucking smiles because he knows that there’s not a damn thing that Sebastian can do about it. Even here he’s only human, and it doesn’t help that he’s never been a great human being at that. No, Sebastian writhes in more than his blood because he isn’t good enough, and he never could be -- he’s not exceptional at anything. He’d failed as a son, he’d failed as a brother, he’d failed as a detective, and as a father.

And now he’s drowning in it.

With that smile, Ruvik takes his leave. His turn is slow and unamused, the flow of his robe flickering slightly as it dissolves into nothing and the air where he’d stood becomes devoid of his presence. And Sebastian has to watch; Ruvik doesn’t even care enough to see him die, he just gives the command to his servant and leaves. The detective is as good as dead anyway, even if the safe-headed monster left him be, he’d still expire sooner than later.

He wasn’t good enough.

The monster stares down at him for a passing moment, hammer hung limp at his side as he seems almost confused by the pathetic mass of broken, extruded limbs and distorted features. The air in Sebastian’s lungs is poisoned and thinning; his head begins to float on top of water as he tries to keep his focus in tact, still barely grasping on to survival.

He wasn’t good enough.

They took everything away from him, it only makes sense that they save his life for last. All his paranoia, all his pain, they’re going to end it here. Is there any kind of consolation in this? He won’t pray, but he stares through that safe and to something beyond and begs for Joseph to get out of here OK, for Kidman to rescue Leslie, for his daughter to be waiting for him with that half-cocked smile she got when she did something wrong but she knew she was cute while she did it and she’d say:

_“Dad, you were enough.”_

The monster’s swing is ungainly, but Sebastian can’t move to avoid it.


	9. 6. Implications

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sebastian tries (and fails) to take control of a situation.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We're almost to the big reveal! (Ignore the first chapter number (the 9): this chapter takes place SIXTH chronologically!)

_“Get away from her!”_

A gunshot echoes throughout the room, so loud and so stinging that it’s hard to tell who’s shouting and who’s staring on in utter terror. But when silence settles around them, Sebastian is left glaring at his partner with bitter scowls drawn on both of their faces.

“You aren’t thinking straight, Joseph,” Sebastian grits his teeth, eyes narrowing on his partner sharply. “You need to think about what you’re doing--”

“You’re the one who isn’t thinking straight!” Joseph shouts in return, his voice practically a growl that rolls out from deep within his throat.

_Joseph isn’t your friend anymore._ Sebastian tries to fight that thought in the back of his mind, but he just can’t shake it. Joseph is his best friend and now… no, not in here. In here, their will is little more than a plaything. This man, his partner, isn’t his friend anymore. Not like this. Not after everything he’s been through -- everything that’s happened to him. This place has turned him into a monster.

“Joseph you’re making a mistake! You have to fight whatever corruption this is, okay? I don’t want to hurt you!” But Sebastian is adamant, he’s adamant on at least trying to get his friend to see things his way, to snap him out of this delusion.

“What the hell are you talking about, Sebastian?” Joseph continues; his gun has fallen to his side but he’s since pulled it up and aimed it directly at the elder detective’s head. “...I’m finally seeing the truth. You’re not really him… you’re just another trick!”

“Joseph… it’s me, okay? I don’t know what he’s wormed into your head but I’m not an illusion.”

All this time they’ve spent arguing, Kidman’s held her breath, practically drawn into herself because it’s the only place she can go when wedged between these two men in a stand off.

“Joseph, wait--” she finally parts her lips, stance suggesting that she wants to take a step towards one of them even though she remains quite still.

“No, Kidman,” Joseph cuts her off sharply, grip on the gun suddenly stiffening to the point where his aim on Sebastian is assured. _“I won’t let you mock us anymore.”_

Another gunshot rings out, and Sebastian doesn’t think he’ll be fast enough to get out of the way.

But the bullet digs a hole into the concrete wall behind him, nesting itself there as Sebastian braces for a pain that never comes; Joseph had missed, but he stares on in absolute shock like he’s ready to swear his aim had been perfect.

The moment the gunshot stops ringing in the air, the sound of heels clicking against concrete in the distance becomes evident once again; Kidman has bolted, ran like hell to get away from the situation. But Sebastian can barely lean forward and call out her name before the echo of another bullet sailing through the air is heard.

"Get back here Kid!" A shout is thrown into the fray as Kidman makes her escape. It’s probably smart of her to run, but Sebastian doesn't appreciate being abandoned.

So Sebastian prioritizes; getting into a fight with Joseph isn't what he wants to do right now, not like this, so he makes like Kidman and _runs_.

But the balance of the room begins to shift, ground creaking beneath their feet as the pipes climbing across the walls begin to snap and sputter. The sudden emergence of it throws even Sebastian off balance, though Joseph finds himself thrown for even more of a loop. When the ground doesn’t stop shaking, the younger detective finds himself slipping onto his hands and knees, clawing at the ground for any kind of stability.

Sebastian steals that opportunity to make chase, eyes cast down to his partner for only a second before he’s throwing his weight towards the hall.

If Joseph comes at him like this, Sebastian will have no choice but to end his partners life. So he almost prays he doesn’t follow suit. Joseph has never been the most coordinated man under pressure, so he doubts he’ll make a speedy recovery.

That doesn’t decrease the level of stress currently thrust on his shoulders, though, and it doesn’t help that the walls are literally crumbling behind him.

Scattered papers mark up and down the dimly lit hall; certain doors open into clustered offices with potted plants spewing their dirt onto the floor and metal shelves tipping over against the nearest wall. They all go unnoticed--Kidman is less than twenty feet away at any given time and he can’t let her just run, not when she has so much to answer for.

A tattered door makes way for a dark and damp walkway that abruptly ends by the signal of a red alarm light blaring down on them. It reveals a staircase that’s swallowed by the haze of darkness and then thrown back into the light again; Kidman’s heels create a resounding crack with each step she smacks them against the metal grating of the stairs.

The stairs descend deep; deep into a black abyss that neither of them can hope to see the bottom of. But Kidman is more scared of confronting the truth than the metaphorical depths of hell, so she doesn’t stop, no matter how much Sebastian encourages her to do so. She simply continues her descent, only stumbling against the guardrail every now and then.

That is, until she slips and her leg catches on one of the thin, metal support poles.

“Kidman!” Sebastian instinctively calls out, nearly falling through the grating himself as he puts too much weight into his forward lean; but he has a hand extended before he even realizes he’s not close enough to catch her.

“Get away from me!” She wraps a hand around the nearest beam after nearly smacking face first into the flat of the metal stair.

“Kid, look at me,” Sebastian puts his hands up beside his head, no more than four steps behind where she pulled herself back together. “Look, we just need to talk, okay? You’re going to hurt yourself if you keep trying to fumble through this, damn it!”

“Stop lying to me!”

“Why would I lie about your fucking wellbeing? I’m not going to push you down the stairs, Jesus Christ! Right now, all I want is some fucking answers. I’m the one who shouldn’t be able to trust you! Please, just tell me who sent you here.” 

He’s been looking for who killed his family, his life, everything that means anything to him for years. And she is one name away from solving that puzzle for him. One name.

“...If I tell you, you’ll kill me.”

Sebastian pauses, drawing back into himself. While he stares down at her, down at her softly spoken but steadfast words, he can’t do much but gape slightly, lips little more than a breath apart from each other. He doesn’t know what to tell her to make her understand.

“ _Juli_ , listen. I’m--” but the second he opens his mouth, half prepared to shove his foot right down his throat, a loud creak cuts him off.

His eyes quickly snap to the origin of the sound just beneath his feet: the stairs are collapsing out from underneath him. They’re going to be dropped right into the dark of the void that swallowed up the space beneath them.

He only has a moment to turn his attention back to her before the whole thing gives out beneath them; he sees a wisp of brown hair flip through the air before both of them fall into nothing.


	10. 5. Labile; lost

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Everything falls apart.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here it is! This is a really long section but it's the most important one too! Enjoy! (Ignore the first chapter number (the 10): this chapter takes place FIFTH chronologically!)

The room is on fire.

Everything is burning.

Groans of agony ache through the very walls as flesh begins to turn to ash, set ablaze out of nowhere; even rusted metal shines with the reflection of flickering embers that engulf everything that they can.

Sebastian shakes, body swelling with heat and fear as everything around him is embraced by fiery death.

His body still pains him, but it doesn’t hurt. He is in torture, but washed with relief. Something is absolutely wrong and as he parts his lips to expel some kind of sound of shock, he finds that he doesn’t spit blood, that his lungs are no longer swimming with the crimson liquid, but that bright sparks of light brush the inside of his cheeks.

As Sebastian watches the safe-headed monster burn to death, he quickly realizes he is also on fire.

The panic is more urgent now. He throws his weight off the ground and runs. Runs where? Runs anywhere. Has that door been there before? Maybe, he doesn’t know. He just runs.

He feels weightless, but also burdened, as if he has rocks floating in his chest. But the rocks are on fire, and he’s quick to remind himself of this.

He doesn’t feel the pressure of the ground against his feet and he assumes it’s because he’s too shocked to actually register the movements in his limbs, nor does he have the time to stop and look back at what he’s leaving behind.

But then the catacombs stop being catacombs; the walls around him begin to crumble and fade, the hard stone becoming dirt and grass as sunshine filters from cracks in the ceiling and engulfs him in a massive burst of light.

Everything around him is falling apart while putting itself back together; he’s thrown in and out of terrains and suddenly the day is night and it’s raining but then it isn’t raining it’s perfectly sunny and he’s in a field of sunflowers but now all the sunflowers have died! The barn is on fire! And the day has become evening and there are screams of pain all around him and he can’t stop falling and floating and slipping through walls and everything is happening at once but then there’s nothing at all and he hurts so bad he can’t stop it but the room was just on fire why is everything burning oh god oh god why can’t it stop make it stop stop stop stop stop --

“--STOP!”

The swirling comes to a halt as Sebastian settles into place, breath seizing in his chest as the only noise in the room emanates from his battered sobs.

What had just happened was… Ruvik did that. Of course. He wants him to suffer, right? But that monster… that monster had killed him. There’s no doubt about it, he’d crushed Sebastian’s skull like a god damned watermelon, for christs sake! He’d watched it happen!

How… had he watched it happen?

Sebastian remains standing (barely), limbs shaking as he looks for any sort of explanation as to how he’d just been set on fire and survived.

He’s in… a mansion.The foyer. With two big staircases on either side of him. And his vision feels like it’s hazy with smog or something, but the faint echo of Clair de Lune wafts over to him softly from the distance and he is, as he had been before, drawn to the sound. Because that sound means safety, usually, and he’s inclined to fall into that safety, even if it’s a trap.

As he approaches, however, the record creaks and stops, repeating the same section of the song as it spins and spins and spins.

Something is wrong, more wrong than usual. But he walks towards that danger nonetheless because he doesn’t feel afraid. Some part of him is terrified, but not of the repeating record or the threat of a monster appearing out of nowhere. He doesn’t know of what. Not yet.

The metal door is emblazoned with the symbol of Beacon, blood permanently fresh and cherry red even though the air has spread across it for what could have been hours. He blinks at the decoration a few times, though his vision doesn’t become any clearer and the action seems pointless. Yet when he lifts a hand to reach for the door, he’s smacked in the face by a revelation that probably should have dawned on him before he’d even started sprinting.

“...This can’t be happening,” he mutters in horror, lifting his arms in front of himself to observe the fact that he has no hands.

But that’s impossible… he can feel them -- he can flex his fingers and still feel the muscles bend and stretch even though, after his elbows, his forearms simply faded into nothing.

It isn’t as if they’d been cut off, but where they should be there is nothing but floating specks of dust and dirt, slowly falling off at his wrist and disappearing into the air.

“This isn’t happening. This isn’t real -- nothing is wrong I’m just -- “ immediately he begins to rationalize the situation, trying to stay calm, but he can feel the terror in his chest slowly building up. But it’s ok because this isn’t real. And it’s ok because he can fix this and he’ll be fine and this is just Ruvik messing with him.

The ground around him shifts slightly. No, not the ground, whatever is coating the ground; ash and dirt and dust and debris and even a scattered cobweb or two -- they float across the floor completely nonchalant until they swell up with a gust of wind and wrap themselves around his palms like bandages.

But not bandages. No. Not that. They don’t wrap up his hands, they become his hands. They’re thick but still long, which makes them look slender despite their weight, and they cut off into sharp points. His fingers, that is. And they’re dark grey like ash; the color of his hands runs half way up his forearm before it tapers into almost normal skin.

This is wrong. Something with him is very wrong and the more he looks the worse it gets. The veins under his skin begin to glow golden, small embers dancing around his form but never burning him.

Hadn’t he been on fire? His eyes shoot down to his chest but all he sees is a bright orange glow, almost warm like the light from a wood stove in winter --

_“You.”_

Sebastian’s attention whips around behind him, eyes widening substantially as they make contact with the near silver glare of the man staring back at him.

_“Ruvik --”_ Sebastian spits back, fear and gall mingling together so that he remains frozen in place. The body horror he’s currently experiencing will have to wait until after he’s escaped certain death.

_“ -- What the fuck did you do to me?”_ Alright, never mind. Guess we’re confronting that problem first.

Ruvik doesn’t answer, but the more he holds his glare, the more angry he appears. The burns across his face only make him look meaner, vicious disdain tearing across his expression as every piece of it contorts into a scowl.

Ruvik wants Sebastian dead as much as Sebastian wants Ruvik dead.

Slowly, carefully, Sebastian begins to back up. As much as his body tells him he wants to fight, he isn’t stupid enough to think he could take on this man that literally has control of everything here.

So when Ruvik leans forward to begin walking towards the detective, Sebastian isn’t shy to turn around and bolt.

This running feels so familiar, like he’s been running for ages on end without stopping. But his limbs don’t tire, not even slightly. Still, wherever he goes, he can feel the pulse of Ruvik’s presence echo just behind him; it feels like all his efforts are fruitless because no matter where he goes, Ruvik is right there with him.

He bolts around a corner, back pressed to the wall as he begins to scramble for any sort of escape only to come up empty handed. But he has to stay calm, he’s gotten away from him before, there has to be a way to do it again.

Unless, of course, Sebastian is Theseus in the maze and he’s just getting closer and closer to the center without a string to lead him back out.

Closing his eyes, he steadies himself so that he can properly run a train of thought through that thick skull of his. Only then, after his head is no longer consumed with the thoughts of what Ruvik will do when he catches him, does Sebastian acknowledge the tug at his feet.

At first he’s alarmed, but when he leans down to observe it, he finds a small ventilation grate screwed into the wall. It’s only a few inches tall and a foot wide at max, but it’s size isn’t what draws his attention. No, he finds himself staring at the grate because pieces of his leg are actually being drawn into it, sucked gently through the shaft like a weak vacuum pulling in specks of dust. When he presses his hand against the grate, the same thing happens; his fingers break into smaller components and begin passing through the slot in the wall.

“What the fuck…” he mutters to himself, instinctively pulling his hand back out again, though still morbidly interested in what’s happening.

No, interested isn’t the word. It’s a weird feeling, he can’t explain. Yes, he’s interested, but he’s also excited, like a kid discovering how to run for the first time, like someone had pumped him full of battery acid and let him run free.

But he doesn’t waste his time sitting there contemplating all the things this revelation could mean, he simply accepts it and leans forward, letting his entire body collapse into nothing but ash so that he can pass through the grate in the wall.

For a moment, he’s blind. But also not blind. He doesn’t feel like he’s crammed into a small space, but he also doesn’t feel any bigger or smaller; he’s just as he’d been. It’s only when he rolls out the other side of the vent that he has the properly terrified reaction.

“Jesus fucking christ!” he almost chokes on his own words, entire body reforming itself out of a cloud of dust that’d been swept up off the floor. What the fuck is happening to him? Had he really lost his entire human body? And what is he now? Some kind of lovecraftian abomination of dirt and ash?

“This isn’t happening… this isn’t happening…” But it is, Sebastian. Now how the fuck are you going to cope with it?

He doesn’t know what’s happening and he’s mortified. Rightly so! What the fuck did Ruvik do to him? What is he turning into? Is there any way to go back? Instinctively he glances down to his body piecing itself together and the morbid curiosity is so ingrained at this point he can’t look away no matter how vile.

His chest is wide open. Literally; a massive emptiness has engulfed his whole torso. But in this emptiness there floats three faintly glowing lumps, almost like coals slowly burning. With a shaky palm, he can’t stop himself from gently flicking one of the rocks only to find that it hurts. He feels actual, genuine pain. But only there, only in the fiery masses in his chest.

It’s his heart, broken into three pieces. Dead in his chest but the only part of him that still feels alive.

This can’t be happening.

For a long time, he simply sits in that dark bedroom, staring at his rib cage putting itself back together, staring at the hole in the wall he’d just willed his body to fade through.

**Like a ghost.**

“No…”

_“You shouldn’t exist.”_

Sebastian’s attention is once again turned to the cloaked man, but this time his body doesn’t tense up, he doesn’t prepare to run, he simply stares in horror. _“What did you do to me?”_

“Don’t you get it? _I didn’t do anything to you._ ”

“You’re fucking right I shouldn’t exist but here I fucking am!” he spits, courage spiking wildly in the back of his throat. “You want me to believe you didn’t have a hand in this? You think I did this to myself?”

Ruvik pauses, nostrils flaring as he glares at the detective in disgust. Why he isn’t taking this opportunity to reach out and murder him is beyond Sebastian, but he doesn’t plan on leaving until he gets an answer.

“You didn’t do this to yourself. You did this to Sebastian,” Ruvik finally answers, straightening his shoulders slightly.

Did this… to Sebastian? But that’s him -- that doesn’t make any sense. He’s sure he’s the only him, what’s Ruvik trying to get at?

“I didn’t turn myself into a monster.”

“You turned him into a monster.”

“Quit the bullshit! I am not having this cryptic fucking conversation with you as you stall trying to find a way to kill me!”

Ruvik seems taken aback by that comment, lips practically curling into a growl. “What do you mean?”

“If you wanted me dead, I’d be dead. The only reasonable conclusion as to why I’m still here right now is that you can’t kill me. Why is that?”

For a long span of time, the two men simply stare at each other, as if in a Texan style cowboy draw; you’d half expect a tumbleweed to roll across the floor right then and there. But it doesn’t, and it’s some time before Ruvik finally opens his mouth again.

“You’re already dead, Sebastian. You aren’t even Sebastian anymore. You’re an abomination, a glitch, a virus. You corrupted the detectives source code when he died and turned it into this. You are infecting my machine, perverting it like all those scientists before you. You are _malware_ , and I want you _wiped out._ ”

There is no response. Sebastian isn’t a smart man; it’s been said before and it’ll be said again. He’s been down to the KCPD lab several times in his life and he can barely figure out how to turn on a computer. This is not his area of expertise.

He knows how to fix a gun jam, knows how to build a tourniquet if someone needs it, knows how to ration food, how to hotwire a car. He can translate spanish to english and back again, he could take out a guy twice his size with a few marked hits. He could start a fire.

He could start a fire.

_He could start a fire._

“You did this to me.” The bed beside him catches fire, flames climbing up the headboard until they’d reached the ceiling. “Your machine did this to me.”

When he speaks, his tone remains calm, but the anger is boiling just beneath the surface. Ruvik took everything. And he just keeps taking. He took Lily, he took Myra, he took Joseph, Kidman, Leslie, and now he’d taken Sebastian. He’d taken Sebastian, murdered him, and turned him into this.

“You’re going to pay for this.”

“You don’t seem to be grasping what I’m saying--” Ruvik insists sternly, but Sebastian refuses to let him get another word in.

_“I will see you burn.”_

The fire from the bed spreads to the rest of the room; wallpaper rolls and chips off, chairs begin to collapse in on themselves, sparks shoot into the air and dance around the room as if they’d been choreographed. All of this happens at the same time until it culminates into one massive fireball that engulfs everything.

“You gave me power. You let me become this. And now…” Sebastian looks at his hands. Or rather, what they’d become. His chest glows bright with the fire he’d set to the room, eyes black all but for his glowing irises. “...and now we’re going to kill everything that you stand for. And you can’t do anything to stop us.”

Ruvik doesn’t smirk or cock any kind of expression other than anger. The fire that begins to crawl towards him clearly puts him on edge, but he doesn’t flinch, only growls in contempt. “Then you’ll be prepared to see your friends die in that pursuit.”

“If they get in our way.”

Ruvik doesn’t immediately respond to that, and for obvious reasons; no one would have expected Sebastian to be so prepared to murder his friends to get what he wanted. But the detective’s expression is stiff, all but that small smile he eventually cracks across his glowing features.

“You said it yourself, I turned Sebastian into a monster. I made him this. And now we’re going to get what we want. Everything we want.”

“You’re not alone in there, are you detective?” No response. “You will _not_ get my machine.”

“Oh, we’re going to get it. We’re going to take it. And then we’re going to use it for what it was meant to be. And you don’t really have a choice, do you?”

Just as the room is completely swallowed by the vicious teeth of flame, Ruvik's manifestation dissipates like static on a TV screen; his apparition flees from the room and runs to god knows where, leaving Sebastian's ghost to chase after him with little control over the function of his new body.

“Son of a bitch!” Sebastian shouts, escaping the burning room into the hall. There’s a faint echo in his voice that emanates from the back of his throat; he doesn’t notice it in the slightest. He’s too busy, too focused on the man who ran from him. Ruvik's ability to teleport within this realm is a skill that Sebastian will need to acquire on his own after ample infection of the server…

Ruvik is obviously trying to escape the system but… how? With Leslie? What’s so special about that boy that Ruvik needs to get his hands on the kid? That he fears Sebastian’s interference so intensely?

Whatever it is, the kid has to die if it means keeping Ruvik trapped...

“Fuck… what’s happening to me?” It suddenly becomes clear that his potential ranges beyond what he is even aware of. But Sebastian is still terrified of that prospect. What is he becoming? What is this corruption doing to him?

“We’re ok… we’re ok…” he continues repeating to himself, walking down the hall in slow pursuit of the fiend that’s trying to escape him. There’s no particular rush -- Ruvik and him will eventually meet face to face again. And after Sebastian wreaks his vengeance, he’ll have plenty of time to find out about who really made this machine, whose life he’ll have to ruin next.

But then, after he’s walked less than a hundred steps down the hall, it hits him that he has no idea what he’s doing. He’s… he’s alone. He’s one of them now, a monster made by STEM. And he can fight it all he wants but he’ll never be Sebastian again.

“Fuck… fuck!” He can’t control this thing that’s burning inside him that wants to devour everything around him. And even if he did let it out, then what? Then he’s still alone. He was always alone...

“You aren’t alone, Sebastian. You don’t have to be, you know?”

“How? They’re… never going to take me back. Not like this.”

_“Just… make them. Make everyone take us back.”_

“No… I can’t do that.”

_“I’ll help you.”_

He stops and considers the notion. But the more the turmoil inside him mounts, the more his stature wavers -- the scenery around him crumbles and gives way to something new, the walls reconstruct themselves, the floor gives way -- his emotions are affecting the world around him.

_“Dad?”_

His attention shoots in the direction of that voice. That voice, the one that he hasn’t heard in years but he still remembers because it’s haunted him every fucking day.

“Who… who said that?” Beneath his feet, the wood becomes tile, wires begin winding up the walls, puddles of unknown fluid rising up from cracks below, and the dimly soft lighting of the mansion becomes harsher.

“Dad!”

And he knows, he knows he should be hunting down Ruvik. But that voice is so tiny and soft and sweet and it can’t be real but… oh god did he want it to be real.

“Lily… _florecita_ \--please… where are you?”

He can no longer feel physical pain in his falsified body but he’ll be damned if he doesn’t feel that ache in his heart. Even then, even with his insides burned out and his body turned to soot, he can’t stop his broken heart from beating for her.

But when he asks her where she is, he garners no response. The lights above flicker softly as the room inhales and exhales into something much larger than the narrow hallway he’d been in before. Trays and carts are scattered about haphazardly but he hasn’t been paying attention so he couldn’t tell you where they originated from.

“Sebastian?”

“Lily?”

But that wasn’t his daughter.

He doesn’t know why he’d thought she’d ever call him by his first name when she’d barely ever gotten to call him dad. He just wanted to believe it was her so bad he held on to the illusion for as long as he could and then…

“Sebastian what the… _who are you?_ ”

“You don’t need to act surprised, Kidman,” he mutters in response, hardly even bothering to turn around and face her. His tone at this point is practically a growl. “Really. Didn’t you know what you were getting into?”

“What did he do to you?”

“He didn’t do this to us. I did this to us. You did this to us.”

Something begins to stir in his brain, something he hasn’t felt before. For no particular reason, he has, then at that moment, come to the conclusion that he can’t trust Kidman. She felt… wrong. More wrong than him, as if her very presence here were an insult. Not just to Ruvik but to Sebastian and Joseph and the system itself. She has less of a place here than he does.

Kidman quickly realizes the boat she’s in, one that’s got more than a few holes in the bottom and she’d rather abandon it than try and plug them up. Because, to be fair, this ship is sinking faster than she can bail it out. “Sebastian listen to me… none of this is--”

“Real? It’s real enough, Kid,” the words come out of his mouth with ease, though he doesn’t really know where they came from. The blunt end of his speech has softened into something unlike him, into something deceivingly casual.

But there’s also something so elegant about the way he walks around the room, the way the smoke falls off his back in small plumes, swirling around his feet before settling and being reabsorbed. He places a hand on the wall, finding his ashen palm splaying across the wires and tile.

“You’re not… a detective. Not one of us. Not really. Who are you?” he continues, body simulating the sensation of swallowing without actually committing the act.

Kidman doesn’t answer, probably because she doesn’t know how. He isn’t like the other haunted, he’s still self aware. And she doesn’t have any means to fight him anyway, so her options are limited to running and hiding.

“You were my responsibility, Kidman. We were supposed to… fuck…” He wants to massage the bridge of his nose because of habit, but he’s scared to touch his face out of fear that his hand will simply pass through his skull.

“I didn’t know this was going to happen, Sebastian. I swear. I would never have let them bring you here if I knew any of this.”

And part of him knew she was being honest. Because part of him still swelled up with the innate desire to just be a father and actually help her like he’s tried to do since the day she joined the KCPD.

But that other part of him just wants to see her dead for what she’s done to them.

_“You’re not telling us the truth.”_

“Kidman, please just talk to us.”

_“Or we can always get what we want the hard way.”_

Silence.

“...Juli, _you need to get away from me.”_

Some part of Kidman must know that Sebastian is still in there, at least a part of him. The part that’s dedicated to his job and fought like hell for the greater good. The part that’s telling her to get away from him before he does something he can’t take back.

But that other part of her just wants to get as far away from him as possible.

So she does.

Kidman runs, heels clicking against the hard floor with such resolution that he can tell she’s out of the room before he’s even turned his head to follow her with his eyes.

“I guess we should follow her. We shouldn’t have let her go,” he eventually sighs, hands falling to his sides before he treads after her. The thoughts that run through his head then aren’t comprehensive, more like lines of computer code. As an onlooker, he has no idea what they mean, but he somehow makes sense of them anyway. “I’m going to find out who you are whether you tell me willingly or not, Kidman.”

When he walks, he does so casually, his body disassembling and reassembling itself effortlessly as he materializes closer and closer to her without even having to run. But it’s not that he’s lazy or anything of the sort, it just so happens that in that moment he figures out how to do that neat little trick and he kind of doesn’t know how to put the brakes on it yet.

“You can’t run from me,” he waves his hand, collapsing a stack of wooden crates at her side so that they explode into splinters, nearly knocking her over. But with a gasp and a small stumble, she regains herself and turns down a hall to the left.

He adjusts to her escape by twisting his wrist and pulling his palm towards himself, snapping an overhead pipe so that steam spills out upon them, heat blasting down the hall and filling the volume of it; it would’ve burned him if he’d had a human body to be burned. But she keeps running despite all this, disappearing into the fog while all he does is cock his head at the trouble she’s causing him.

“Look, I probably said some mixed words back there, but I really need for you to stop so we can talk--” Sebastian opens his mouth to continue on with his casual speech, but when he emerges from the other side of the mist into another expansive room, the words catch in the back of his throat.

There’s Kidman, standing and staring at him with a vicious glare that only emit minor waves of fear, and then behind her, there’s Joseph.

“Cool. _The gangs all here,_ ” Sebastian mocks with a sneer flaring out his nostrils. After a shake of the head and a roll of the eyes, he pretends to cross his arms while casting a half open gaze onto his partner and the junior detective.

“Is that--” Joseph’s lips part to speak when he sees what his partner has become, but Kidman quickly shuts him down.

“It’s Sebastian. Something’s _possessing_ him.”

“Sebastian… what happened?” Joseph doesn’t gasp or show any immediate signs of alarm, but the wrinkle of his gloves get deeper and deeper as he clutches his fingers into fists. It’s just like Joseph not to immediately jump to conclusions, but where else can your mind go when you’re staring down the ghoulish form of your best friend. “Sebastian are you still in there?”

“Oh my god, are you really going to talk to us like that?” Sebastian half laughs, once again cracking that unsettling smile across his face. “Oh, you think he’s still human, don’t you? That there’s something for you to save?”

“You aren’t... thinking straight, Sebastian,” Joseph continues, heart pounding louder and louder in his chest. “You need to think about what you’re doing--”

“I need to think about what I’m doing? What have I done, exactly? I mean, other than kill your best friend. But, hey, if I didn’t, something else would have. I just _buried_ him deep, deep down.”

“Sebastian you’re making a mistake! You have to fight whatever corruption this is OK? I don’t want to hurt you!” But Joseph is adamant -- Sebastian just has to be in there somewhere.

And Joseph is right.

“...You can’t. Hurt me. I wish you could. I don’t feel anything.”

The silence resumes. Sebastian is still Sebastian but he is also… something else. Still himself, just a bad version of himself. And he knows what he’s thinking is wrong but… he also knows he can’t stop it.

“Sebastian… it’s me, ok? We’re going to help you. Please just… let us help you.”

“You can’t help me, Joseph. I’m just--” Sebastian chokes on something in the back of his throat and then pauses before shaking his head and continuing. “You can’t help us. We’re already dead.”

“Sebastian please just--”

“Just what, Joseph? Are you in any place to give us advice? When you’re the one who keeps falling into the darkness over and over again? You’re one step away from turning into a monster yourself. And you want to save this soul? Where do you get off?”

“You… helped me come back. I can’t just let you fall like this.”

“You know, this conversation we just had sounds really familiar,” he nods to himself, taking slow steps forward, towards his partner and towards Kidman. “Almost as if… you know, I could picture myself reciting the same exact message to you. When you get overtaken by Ruvik’s pathetic corruption, I can see myself trying to talk you out of it too.”

Kidman begins to back away instinctively, but the ghost doesn’t walk any faster or slower, he simply keeps a steady pace. She has a right to be scared, and Sebastian fights every single urge in his body to enjoy her fear. He doesn’t want to take satisfaction in this, but he can’t help it. He starts to wonder if she’ll cry.

“I’m never turning into one of those things again--” Joseph only gets the beginning of a sentence in before he’s shut down.

“I’m dead because of you,” Sebastian cuts him off, attention still set on Kidman. “And Joseph? Do you really think you could ever come back from something like this? Go back to being normal? I don’t think you can. Just let me kill you. You’re my friend, after all. I can make it easy… and after I get what I want out of Kid, she can join you.”

“You’re not Sebastian…” Joseph finally swallows; he’s now pointing his pistol directly at the mockery of his partner. “He’s dead, isn’t he? That’s what you said.”

“Dead on the outside, yes. But _consciously_ buried inside me.”

“Then I should have no qualm with killing you.”

The ghost doesn’t humor that with an answer, he simply blinks twice and raises a brow; has he not made it clear by now that he can’t die? Joseph will figure that out quick enough when he tries to shoot him with that gun, so the former detective continues stalking towards the pair.

And, honestly, the part of him that’s sorry for what he’s about to do is wedged deep down under the part of him that isn’t. Sebastian--the real one, the one that Joseph insists is still alive--is lying beneath the weight of a glitch that’s turned him rabid. And silently, the vicious part of him thanked the original for making such a great host. 


	11. Mother (Epilogue)

Nervous fingers intertwine with each other, tired eyes flickering around as if their owner believes, at any given moment, that he’ll be attacked by a large, savage animal.

James Park has had a long night.

And now he’s on an elevator, standing next to a suit-clad businessman who is probably so deep in his own ass he doesn’t notice the fact that the kid next to him is about thirty to forty minutes away from just breaking down into a work-induced panic attack.

The elevator dings and James makes his exit. There is no sound expelled from his lips, just the tiredly eager (how is that even possible?) step of his feet on bright linoleum floors. Why is everything so bright? He can’t really tell you. Maybe this company just has a huge fucking boner for the color white.

Every now and then he feels his heart seize up in his chest whenever he passes someone who looks vaguely important. Because vaguely important people can have him vaguely murdered for screwing up his job. Vaguely.

When he eventually ducks into an office off to the left, he shuts the door behind him, attention immediately narrowing on the women behind the desk. He came straight here from the lab and he can’t let anything break his stride. Not when it’s this important.

“We’re… having difficulties. With that virus again. It’s spread to another server,” he licks his lower lip, which has grown chapped; he doesn’t know how to phrase this. “The firewall didn’t work. They want to shut the whole thing down--”

“And you told them you wouldn’t, right?” Is the rather sharp response he gets in return.

“Yes but--”

“But what?”

James knows the position he’s in. He knows what it means to try and argue with a superior. But he also knows that he doesn’t much appreciate being talked down to. Especially not from her.

“But he is tearing STEM _apart_. We have sent in over a dozen employees and he kept all of them except for one. One, which he sent back completely scrambled. He is... he’s sentient. He’s completely sentient and I’ve never seen anything like him. I would love to get in there and just talk to him but he’s not… he’s not going to cooperate. You know that.”

There’s silence. The woman at her desk remains still for some time, obviously mulling some train of thought over in her head. Her fingers are pressed together flat in front of her face, as if she were praying. Maybe she is. “Are you suggesting we terminate the servers then? Do you agree with them?”

James pauses. He’s just another techie who’d been placed under the thumb of Mobius with no real choice. The likelihood he’ll ever escape from their payroll is unlikely. And to directly disobey command is unheard of. But here he is, being asked by his superior, whether he wants to shut part of their billion dollar system down.

“I think… he’s unique. And I think we could learn something from him. But we can’t pretend like this is a controlled environment. He is dangerous and he has made it clear that he wants this entire corporation burned to the ground…”

There’s a pause. James has something else to say, but it isn’t his place to say it, so he bites his lip. The woman is his superior, yes, but they have a mutual understanding. That’s why he’s here now and not biting his tongue and following orders. They communicated, worked together. Because neither of them trust Mobius worth a damn. They both have more personal stakes in this...

It’s true, though, he isn’t lying. This virus… he’s been studying it for days now. It had cropped up the second Detective Castellanos had been killed in the system and since then it’s been a _nightmare_. Mobius picked volunteers and employees to enter STEM, thinking that with Ruvik’s will gone it’d be much safer. But all they’d found was a pissed off ghost.

He’d killed half the people they sent in. The other half either came back completely ridden with trauma or raving of all the strange things they’d seen.

And the virus was spreading. They’d developed a system for communicating with patients inside STEM and he’d gone and vandalized all of it. They’d written an entire case report for an ex convict who’d been trapped in STEM and, after going through the system, it came back with “FUCK MOBIUS” in the middle of 4 pages of words. He was insatiable.

People who did survive told tales of all the wild things they’d seen. The Victoriano estate was in flames. Krimson city was destroyed, save for one house in one small neighborhood. Everything smelled like cigarette smoke.

They described the virus as taking on the appearance of a humanoid. Male. Slightly above average in height. His eyes were black aside from the flaming irises and his hands were covered in ash. They said his ribcage was always burning.

And James is absolutely fascinated with the whole thing. He’s an incredible anomaly… a virus born from the death of a man and a perfectly timed glitch. It’s… it’s amazing! The things he could do if they just knew how he worked.

But he sincerely doubts the virus would be opening up anytime soon. He’s about as cooperative as Ruvik had been.

“What if we sent that other detective back in? He… maybe the virus is only coded to be hostile to strangers? Maybe it’ll work with someone it knows?”

“No, that isn’t going to work. You said it yourself, he’s sentient. He’ll know who sent him.”

“There’s… really no other options here. You’re acting like you want us to just leave him alone and pretend he’s not there.”

“Maybe that’s the best we can do at this point? He’s not a monster, we just have to find a way to reason with him.”

“Look, Myra, I know you want to believe he’s still in there but he’s not--” it’s too late he realizes he’s stepped out of term.

The woman, whose eyes had drifted elsewhere, snaps her attention back on the young man before her. Yet, rather calmly, her hands, press flat onto the desk.

“I am aware. The police already took his body. I read the news report.” She speaks softly but sternly, as if her gaze alone could snap a man in half. Honestly, it probably could. And, in that instant, James shrinks back slightly.

“Ms. Hanson, I’m sorry to have bothered you. You just tell the administrator what you want me to do. I can’t be any more involved with this. Am I dismissed?”

“You are.”

There are no other words exchanged. James takes his leave as Myra is left alone in her office.

But the second the door closes behind him, she draws her fingers to her temples to massage them gently. It’s so hard to keep a stiff face all the time, especially when all she wants to do is punch half her coworkers in the face.

But that isn’t the Mobius way. She has to be strict and cordial and precise and never ever care even remotely about the people who get stepped on along the way.

Sebastian wasn’t supposed to get involved. She never should have sent him those notes. Or maybe she should have told him about her plan the from the start? Maybe she should have gotten him involved? Is there any way she could have stopped this from happening?

Sebastian was dead. He was gone.

But she couldn’t let it go.

He didn’t deserve this… he didn’t deserve to be trapped inside STEM for the rest of his life. And Myra can’t help but hate herself for that. Is this her fault? Did her paranoia spiral out of control? Did she get him killed?

She can’t think like that. All she can do now is try and think of a way to fix this, a way to get him out. Or help him find peace. Something. Anything….

A report came in from someone who’d survived an encounter with Sebastian’s ghost in STEM earlier that week. They said they survived because they told him they had a family to get back to. They said that they saw him in a park inside the city. They said he wasn’t alone, but the second he saw them, the person he was with disappeared. They said the person looked like a child.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for taking the time to read all my AU bullshit! I've put a lot of work into it and I hope it shows! If you guys wanna see my design for Ghost Sebastian, I've drawn it a few times on my art blog, but a good reference is here: http://noisyghost.tumblr.com/post/114547699497/we-developed-stem-but-there-is-a-ghost-in-the. 
> 
> If you have any questions, please message me on my blog: ghost-phage.tumblr.com. I will answer any questions you have about what the fuck you just read!


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